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, July 29, 2017

I remember that some other buildings had mail chutes, as did my father's office building. But my father would never use them: his general, pain-in-the-ass principle was to rely on mediations as little as possible. That's why I always had to confirm reservations even when they were guaranteed, check theater times despite what the ticket said, etc. And so when I came with him to his office, and when they moved to a new building and I was visiting, I always had to go to the mailbox on the corner with his mail. He also thought letters would get stuck in the mail chute.

Me, I loved (and still love) seeing other people's letters come barreling past me sometimes when I waited for the elevator. I liked how fast they went, as though not made of paper but of metal. The chute forced them to go almost perfectly vertically, so there was almost no air-resistance. And that's why they didn't get stuck!

posted by William 2:57 PM
. . . 0 comments

Friday, July 07, 2017

I remember the bees buzzing around and hanging from the jams in Bellagio when we went down to breakfast. Somehow they were always there before us, no matter how early we were up. They were enjoying the morning but they also were part of it, part of the morning they enjoyed. The had a proprietary interest in the jam, and in the whole scene.

posted by William 11:27 PM
. . . 0 comments

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