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, December 30, 2021

I remember one day in the park suddenly knowing that if I threw a rock down hard enough it would break. This seemed an amazing thing to me -- amazing to know in advance and then to actually do it. It was as though from one second to the next I was released from a paradigm and saw something that was clear and open but that I couldn't see before. Here was a rock that had existed from the beginning of the world (as I thought) and now simply by the use of my own muscles I could throw it hard enough to break.

This thought must have been related to my discovery, maybe around the same time, that you could throw things downwards faster than they could fall. That was really interesting. And now I could see that though rocks didn't break when I dropped them, I could throw them with enough force that they would.

posted by William 5:49 PM
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