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

Friday, January 03, 2014

I remember "Adam Smith" (who died yesterday: George Jerome Waldo Goodman). I didn't notice the quotation marks around his name on the cover of his perennially best-selling books The Money Game and Super-Money when I was in high school. They had a copy in the candy/stationery/newspaper store where I would take C'mere, the prejudiced lady's dog, to get her the first edition of the Daily News at night, and some chocolate Bonomo Turkish taffy for me.

Then I took a course on the Enlightenment, and was astonished to see Adam Smith ranged among the eighteenth century philosophes. That was when the penny dropped (so to speak). It was really interesting to see my own everyday environment -- what environment more everyday, every single day than a dark, richly stocked candy store? -- reorganized, framed and geometrized, as though by the plan and elevation somehow diagramed by those quotation marks, crystalized into an unexpectedly global lattice by a reading assignment about a world an ocean and two centuries away.

posted by William 1:56 PM
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