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

Saturday, May 05, 2012

I remember the butterfly locks inside our bathroom doors. I was forbidden to touch them before I ever knew what they were. At some point, years later, I learned they were locks and that adults could work them, and years after that I wss allowed to use them too. They went from being yet another example of some pure adult object, not a symbol nor an instrument but just something serenely legible only to adults (when the locks were just inscrutable features of the adult world), to a kind of knowledgeable agent interacting with them, even adult visitors (when I learned they were locks), to a sign of my own arrival at an age of competence (when I too was allowed to turn them).

posted by William 5:34 PM
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