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

Thursday, January 24, 2019

I remember reading about Kennedy writing his inaugural address -- or touching it up -- in the limo. This was in William Manchester's A Thousand Days. I remember thinking that having to give an inaugural address might be a reason for me not to be president, since I hated the very idea of giving speeches. Then a year or two later, I remember, we learned about the State of the Union address in a social studies class, and I realized that the president had to give a speech every year. I thought that that was certainly too much. I had an image of the president giving a speech -- I think it was Kennedy because I was still connecting it to his inaugural address -- and that president was definitely some highly competent adult and no version of me at all.

posted by William 1:41 PM
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