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 29, 2022
I remember Pelé! I remember that he played for the Cosmos, which to me meant that his great days were over. Like Willie Mays playing for the Mets. Still, in my mind he replaced Shep Messing and gave me a reason to think the Cosmos could still be of global significance -- could still make soccer something serious in the U.S.
I remember that you recite the cases when you do a Latin declension in reverse alphabetical order: nominative, genetive, dative, accusative, ablative. (We didn't learn the vocative till later.) I was proud of discovering this mnemonic.
Friday, December 23, 2022
I remember
Alexie, Alexie
Mustn't run and mustn't play,
Mustn't jump and mustn't climb,
Must be careful all the time
from Nicholas and Alexandra.
Monday, December 19, 2022
I remember that my father would put his socks on before his pants, which seemed strange to me. In my memory the contrast of his black socks against his calves is very vivid.
Friday, December 16, 2022
I remember being obsessed by the photo from the ballon's perspective of Joseph Kittinger sky-diving from about 20 miles up, when I was in my teens (reminded of it because he just died). He needed oxygen and an insulated suit to fall from that high up; he was in free fall for something like five minutes -- not as long as Mulciber in Homer or Paradise Lost (the relevant passage of which we read a few years later when I was a junior in high school)* but a very long time. ---- * from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,
A Summers day; and with the setting Sun
Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star,
On Lemnos th' Ægean Ile. (I. 742-46)
Tuesday, December 13, 2022
I remember that Christmas is a consumerist festival from way back - and it just seems longer each year - this year I saw decorations on sale in October. Who is that organised, obsessed, deluded. I am not a grumpy Scrooge, but seriously, enough already. There is also this - perhaps its just that the first ones raised expectations unreasonably high: https://hutnyk.wordpress.com/2006/12/09/trinket-crimbo/ The photo is the clincher - at the grandparents house when I was one:
I remember that a nine-volt battery that I put onto a shelf in a chest in my room for safe-keeping, leaked battery acid on the wood of the shelf. (I mentioned this before.) I was surprised and disturbed that this inert thing that I left on the shelf should have turned out to be unreliable and dangerous.
Monday, December 12, 2022
I remember bobby pins -- how interesting they were, not quite as obviously useful as a paperclip, and neither mysterious nor unmysterious in the way that both my grandmothers and my mother and even girls my own age used them,
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