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

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

I remember the spookiness of dinner in Windows on the World: clouds obscuring and revealing the scores of miles we could see, and the slight feel of the building swaying. A restaurant in the clouds: the rest of the building was pretty much empty, but you took those super-fast, ear-popping elevators straight up to a kind of movie set. Later, in May of 2001, we went to a restaurant in Cyprus, the Maryland House (!), which was on the finished top floor of a building the rest of which was just girders and scaffolds, under construction with no sheathing put in yet: you took a construction elevator to get there and then you were in a dark and lovely room. Windows on the World was like that too. I remember not even thinking about what a daylight meal, what breakfast, would be like there, amidst the bright blue of day, until reading about the people who were killed there on September 11. Clean, crisp napkins, bright, cold water in crystal: that's what my experience and my imagined experience had in common.

posted by William 8:38 AM
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