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

Wednesday, January 23, 2019

I remember Russell Baker (who died today). I remember my father reading him in the Times when I was a child and how my father would laugh out loud -- a rare thing for him to do when he was reading the news. I remember that later, in high school, I looked forward to Russell Baker's twice- or thrice-weekly columns. By then they'd moved to the op-ed page because by then there was an op-ed page. I remember my high school English teacher reading aloud one of his columns about reading Proust, which Baker compared to climbing Everest, with Tenzing as his guide, promising him that there would be a cup of tea or a walk along the beach in the not too distant future if he could just hang on. I remember that I would laugh out loud when I read his columns too.

posted by William 12:42 PM
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