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 07, 2005

I remember that my father kept copies of the Times with significant (banner) headlines in a big drawer in the middle of one of the cabinets we had; later when he got my mother new book shelves they went into a big box in the closet. When they were more easily accessible I used to like reading them. He had the assassination of JFK, I think the moon-landing, although that might be wrong since we were in Italy at the time, and various other signal events. I don't think anything about the Cuban missile crisis. And he had the newspapers from the days we were born. I think the headline on the day I was born was that Eisenhower was reelected and that the Suez crisis was going full tilt, with Anthony Eden either blustering or withdrawing under U.S. pressure. I was born in a Wednesday.

posted by william 4:14 PM
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