I remember / je me souviens

I remember / je me souviens

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For those limbic bursts of nostalgia, invented by Proust, miniaturized by Nicholson Baker, and freeze-dried by Joe Brainard in his I remember and by Georges Perec in his Je me souviens.

But there are no fractions, the world is an integer
Like us, and like us it can neither stand wholly apart nor disappear.
When one is young it seems like a very strange and safe place,
But now that I have changed it feels merely odd, cold
And full of interest.
--John Ashbery, "A Wave"

Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
--Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

Sunday, April 15, 2012

I remember how shopkeepers used balance scales to weigh groceries, briskly adding or removing the hexagonal weights, balancing in mere seconds. I sometimes doubted whether the measurements were always exact, but since that doubt didn't seem to be shared by anyone in these transactions, I figured that they must indeed be exact, and that mastering the process -- estimating the weights to start with and change, deciding whether the scale was level -- was just one of those things adults were naturally good at.

I remember learning later, in connection to the difference between mass and weight, that balance scales are unaffected by variations in gravity. It was fun to think that your groceries would have a different weight on top of a hill as measured by a modern spring scale -- but the rustic balances wouldn't be fooled. It justified their apparent cumbersomeness.

I remember that the physics textbooks at all grade levels -- from 7th to 10th at least -- started with a chapter on force and acceleration, and ended with something on electromagnetism. All too predictable and repetitious, even if we were learning new things every year.

posted by sravana 12:32 AM
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