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, January 25, 2014

I remember my parents bought some Planters Mixed Nuts for a party. I'd seem them at other people's houses (e.g. the Herings'), but never in their can. We didn't buy them much.

You had to open them with a key that was attached to the top of the can. You inserted a strip of metal which stuck out just underneath the rim into a slot in the key, and then wound the strip around the key as you opened it. (Tennis ball cans, I would find out, were opened the same way, but with a more satisfying woosh of a vacuum being breached.)

I would never have been able to figure out how to open the can, and it impressed me that my parents simply knew how to do it. All that knowledge they had of things that weren't part of our house, at least not day-to-day. They knew about the household things in other kinds of houses as well. But what really impressed me is that they knew, before they even opened the can of nuts, that you could get cut on the edge of the metal strip when you'd opened it. They had a sense of possible childhood injury that I didn't even know existed. They knew how a can of nuts might interact with their own child. It was as though we were two little things, the can of nuts and me, and they were grown-ups who knew about us, knew more about us than we did.

posted by William 5:34 PM
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