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

Monday, March 05, 2018

I remember my father telling me how Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile: the physiological knowledge he had as a med student, how it allowed him to figure out how to pace himself, the help that he got from his friends who paced him. My father knew nothing about running (I was a wannabe runner at the time, because of my infatuation with Jim Ryun), but he knew all about Roger Bannister.

posted by William 10:43 PM
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