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, November 20, 2023

I remember that when my father used to do comic fake phone conversations when I was 7 or 8 years old, he'd always end the "conversation" by saying, "Okay, bye." And I was surprised by that formulation -- not the bye, but the "Okay." So I would try to do the same sort of fake conversation and noticed that I always said "okay" before "bye," and then noticed that I always said it in real phone conversations too, and that it was almost impossible not to. That was really interesting.

posted by William 9:21 PM
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