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, April 13, 2020

I remember that we'd often have Thomas's English Muffins on weekends. My parents would split them with a fork. (This is before they came fork-split.). I thought this was some strange and superannuated old-world custom of theirs, especially since Tommy's family, when I had English muffins there, didn't buy Thomas's and split the brand they did buy (Pepperidge Farm?) with a knife. This was akin to their having pancakes from time to time, which we never did. Tommy's parents felt more American, more in touch with America's customs (as seen on TV), than mine. My parents would also toast the English muffins twice! One time in the toaster wasn't enough. (I remember seeing them do this when I was even younger, and we were still going to Stormville, which we stopped doing when I was seven.)

posted by William 11:10 AM
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