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

Sunday, August 02, 2020

I remember reading a comic, maybe Mad Magazine, maybe Superman, where someone asks someone else on a blistering summer's day, "Hot enough for you?" I didn't get the question -- it was obviously too hot -- but later I saw it in a movie, and then heard people say it, and it became a natural American idiom to me, the sort that as a New York Jew I had to learn through observation.

posted by William 11:49 PM
. . . 0 comments

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