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, August 13, 2016

I remember thinking that the word shin referred to the calf. I think I remember reading about them in The Games, which was the book that got me into running. I was disappointed a year or two later when I found out that the beautiful, elegant shape of the back of the lower leg was called by such an ugly word. Calf! And the shin was just some uninteresting cylindrical flatness connecting inelegant knee with inelegant ankle.

I remember, too, my surprise (much younger!) at learning that the little hand pointed out the hour and the big hand the minute. That just seemed wrong, since an hour was so much longer than a minute.

posted by William 11:54 AM
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