by André Aciman
Hardly surprising then that, while vacationing in France, Selwyn’s former tenant, the narrator, should hear that the good old doctor had finally closed the ledger and shot himself.
* * *
And here comes the third baffling aspect of Sebald’s tale. Dr. Selwyn’s business is by no means over even after he dies. In 1986, as the narrator is traveling by train through Switzerland, he begins to remember Dr. Selwyn. And as he thinks of Selwyn, he accidentally—actually, the adverb should be coincidentally—spots an article in that day’s newspaper reporting that “the remains of the Bernese alpine guide Johannes Naegeli, missing since summer 1914, had been released by the Oberaar glacier seventy-two years later.”
The body that was lost during the summer of 1914 moments before World War I has finally worked its way up to the surface, long after the war became a hazy memory, long after its dead have decomposed, long after the bodies of those who lived through that war only to perish in the Holocaust have completely disappeared. In fact, no one who was old enough to be a soldier in 1914 is alive today. Yet suddenly the frozen, undecomposed body of Johannes Naegeli is now younger than Henry Selwyn, himself dead for sixteen years. When Rip Van Winkle returns, he is not only an anachronism; he has every reason to believe, unless he looks in a mirror, that he is twenty years younger than those of his own generation. Meanwhile, Sebald’s narrator would have loved nothing better than to show the newspaper article to Henry Selwyn, to allow the older doctor to come to a reckoning with his younger self. But therein lies the stunning cruelty of time. A reconciliation, which would in theory have straightened out so many things, cannot take place. Reconciliation, reckoning, reparation, restoration, redemption: these are, at best, paltry figures of speech—words—as are the concepts of “unfinished business” and “open ledgers” and being “indefinitely put on hold.” Time has no use for such words. Because, no matter how crafty the ancient grammarians, we still don’t know how to think of time. Because time doesn’t really understand time the way we do. Because time couldn’t care less how we think of time. Because time is just a limp and rickety metaphor for how we think about life. Because ultimately it isn’t time that is wrong for us, nor, for that matter, is it place that is ineradicably wrong. Life itself is wrong.
SLOAN’S GASLIGHT
The Sixth Avenue El train has just cleared the steep bend off Third Street. It is picking up speed and will, at any moment now, bolt uptown. Next stop, Eighth Street, then past Jefferson Market, Fourteenth Street, then all the way north till it reaches Fifty-Ninth Street. But perhaps it is not racing at all but grinding to a stop after that notoriously difficult curve just seconds before it reaches Bleecker Street. It’s hard to tell. The blue lettering on the train’s marker light must spell something, but it’s hard to decipher. Under the El two vehicles seem to know where they’re headed. To the left of the train, on the corner of Sixth and Cornelia, a scrawny, wedge-shaped, twelve-story high-rise strains to look taller than it is. Its numerous lit windows suggest that, despite darkness everywhere, this is by no means nighttime but evening, maybe early evening. The building’s residents are probably preparing dinner, some just walking in after work, others listening to the radio, children doing homework.
This is 1922, and this is Sloan country. The Sixth Avenue El no longer exists as John Sloan painted it in The City from Greenwich Village or in his views of Jefferson Market. Despite its deafening noise, Sloan must have loved the El, and his many portraits of it pulsate with the brassy, vigorous thrill of an overconfident, urban painter who never spurned the clunky, steely structures punctuating life in the city. Under his brushstrokes, though, the here-and-now Village suddenly acquires a lyrical, beguiling, almost dreamlike cast, and its crepuscular inflection suggests that Sloan might have been trying to capture the city as it looked on that day, in that year, from his window, sensing, as rumors must have already been flying by then, that the El didn’t have long to live. “The picture,” he wrote, “makes a record of the beauty of the older city which is giving way to the chopped-out towers of the modern New York.”
Did Sloan like the El—could anyone really have liked the ugly, thundering, mastodonic El? Or was he, like so many of us, struggling to preserve the old—ugly, junky, beaten-up old that it was—simply because it was old and familiar and had been there for so long that no one could even remember the city without it? The scrap metal of the El, they say, would eventually be sold and shipped to Japan; Japan would then bomb us with weapons built from it. Most likely an apocryphal tale but uncanny all the same, since, to alter Freud’s words just a tad, the uncanny is the return of something that was once familiar and later forgotten.
I am standing before John Sloan’s The City from Greenwich Village at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and can’t seem to get away from his portrait of the view from his window. Earlier in the day I sat in one of the Study Rooms at the National Gallery looking over Sloan’s studies for his painting. I loved watching how each of his studies dovetails into the next, and how from mere sketches a work of art eventually blossoms. But the studies reveal very little that is not already in the painting itself. I was hoping to unearth an “extra” of sorts, something telling that the painting covers up, but my untrained eye found nothing.
The city has changed a lot since. And yet, if you remove the El and add more traffic and lights and people, this corner of New York City is really not so different. Bleecker Street is still there, Cornelia still there, the Woolworth Building still looms fluorescent in the distance, and in the evening the store windows along the sidewalks still glisten and beckon to those who pass by and are sometimes reluctant to rush home and hope to wander about a bit or make up a sporadic errand if only to kill time. This is the gloaming, the twilit, two-faced hour between day and night when the city promises things that are at once troubling and enchanting, because our bearings are thrown off, and everything seems so timeless yet so thoroughly time-bound that we drift into phantom zones, urged on by lingering traces of dawn that are either this morning’s or tomorrow’s. Like Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, who was Poe’s French translator, was always stirred by this gaslight hour of the day and, in his tepid love for Paris, must have longed for a long-lost older Paris or perhaps even for desultory vistas of Poe’s New York, the way Poe himself nursed spectral notions of a Paris he never lived to see. Baudelaire was doing what his greatest critic, the German Walter Benjamin, found himself doing sixty years later when he ambled along the streets of a revamped, updated Paris, all the while seeking out haunting reminders of Baudelaire’s vanished arcade passages. As with dowsers, Benjamin felt the magnetic induction of a Paris that had altogether vanished and left no trace of itself.
Benjamin had every reason to intuit Baudelaire’s probable fascination with New York. His escaped German Jewish friends had taken refuge in the United States and kept clamoring for him to join them. Benjamin never made it across the Atlantic. When he finally realized that the Nazis were fast closing in on him and that there was no escape, he took his own life.
Sloan’s painting is my imaginary version of a vanished New York. In the city, we always tread on others’ footprints. We never walk alone. All of us have followed in the footsteps of an artist in the city. All of us have followed a stranger in the crowd at least once in our life. All of us have retraced our own footsteps many years later and been in the same place twice and, like Whitman, “[thought] of time—of all that retrospection.”
Sloan may never have known what his painting would mean in the years to come, but it resonates with the fear that the city—as someone said of his pictures—changes even before the paint dries, that all things die, that the El itself would soon be taken down, and that this was a snapshot of a world already meant to be looked back on someday. He was painting for someone he might no longer be but hadn’t quite become and to whom he was already slipping coded messages in the only notation system “fore-self” and “after-self” understood.
The vision of a
city “now” or of a time “now” that will soon become a city “then” is, like twilight itself, a mirage caught between two illusory temporal zones: the not-yet and the no-more—or, more precisely, a no-more that looks back to a time when it was a not-yet but already knew it would soon be no more.
Art is how we quarrel with time. We burrow between two moments, neither of which stays long enough, and make room for a third that overlooks, shakes off, transcends, and, if it must, distorts time. In his poem “The Swan,” Baudelaire is crossing the Carrousel Bridge and, as he stares at his city, realizes to his great sorrow that Paris changes (“Paris change!”) and that old Paris is no more (“Le vieux Paris n’est plus”). With its scattered relics and shards and perennial dust, Paris reminds him of what the Hellenes left behind once they sacked Troy and burned it to the ground. Cast away in a city that is still his home and yet forever longing to go back to something he cannot name, the poet is now exiled in time.
The Carrousel Bridge had been newly built when Baudelaire walked across it. But because it was too narrow for twentieth-century traffic and not high enough to permit the passage of boats and large barges beneath it, it was eventually torn down and another bridge built a short distance downstream. The new had become old, and I am sure that Walter Benjamin in his perennial yearning to find and roam through Baudelaire’s Paris might have lamented the disappearance of that old bridge. The Paris that all Parisians today would hate to see disappear is, in fact, the very Paris that once displaced Baudelaire’s lamented old Paris.
Everyone has seen pictures of Penn Station rising from the ground of its razed neighborhood, and everyone has seen horrifying images of Penn Station being demolished. Parisians were no less horrified when Baron Haussmann had old Paris pierced to build the new Paris everyone loves today. They were already collecting sketches and photographs of the Paris that was disappearing before their very eyes, particularly in Marville’s stunning photographs of an old and sometimes quite icky Paris whose glistening gutters perpetually run through grimy alleys and side streets that exist only in Marville’s photographs, because those streets and those gutters no longer exist in Paris or in our collective memory of Paris. The destruction of large swaths of Paris and of the Butte des Moulins to house Charles Garnier’s Avenue de l’Opéra in today’s Paris is nowhere captured as hauntingly as in Marville’s photographs. Similarly, George Bellows’s Pennsylvania Station Excavation captures the excavation before the building of Penn Station (1904)—not the demolition of Penn Station (1963).
I never see one thing only; I see double. Like the stereoscope, “an optical instrument used to impart a three-dimensional effect to two photographs of the same scene taken at slightly different angles and viewed through two eyepieces” (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language), or like Charles Marville’s desire to invent a stereochronic camera able to preserve a solid, three-dimensional image of the Paris that was fast disappearing under Haussmann’s ambitious reconstruction plan, Sloan’s painting is lodged between then and now. I discovered almost by chance an online site that compares pictures of Marville’s Paris as it was then and Paris as it is now. And then on another occasion I stumbled on the Thunder Bay Press books Paris Then and Now, Rome Then and Now, and New York Then and Now. Each of these volumes asks us to consider two images of the same spot taken a century apart. We stare at the similarities and the differences, unable to envision the two simultaneously—stereoscopically—and are forced to flip back and forth, and back and forth again, trying to capture the meaning of the transit of time.
And yet, much as the passage of time changes almost everything—the stores, the clothes people wear, the kind of vehicles parked alongside the curb—some things remain constant. It is never clear whether it is permanence or change in these contrasting pairs of photographs that I long to grasp. If part of me longs to live at the beginning of the twentieth century, another is grateful I’m stuck in the twenty-first. If part of me loves the present, another yearns for the past. I am confused, but I can’t let go of these double images. I am constantly looking for the right coordinates in time and place. The more I stare and flip back and forth between centuries, the more I realize that I don’t really know where the real me lives, in 1921 or in 2021, or is there some ideal point forever hovering between the two that is my true spot, except that I never seem to find it. Nothing corresponds to what I think I want. I am a free-floating prisoner of endless double takes.
And perhaps it is not so much the old city that I am seeking in Sloan’s city, or another time zone, or just some form of time tourism; what I may be seeking in these paintings and images of a bygone world is just me. Where am I? When am I? And, since we’re asking, who am I?
When I step into the glass-domed arcade of the Galerie Vivienne in Paris or into the far more beautiful Passage in St. Petersburg, or the one in Sydney, what I see is not only a beautifully restored old passageway waving at me from the nineteenth century; what I see is a highly familiar construction almost pulling me into another time warp that suddenly feels like my real home.
If I keep staring at Sloan’s century-old portrait of Sixth Avenue and Third Street in the evening, will I spot myself or, better yet, a far earlier version of myself ambling along the gaslit avenue? And—let’s say—if this gentleman crossing the street on his way home is my great-grandfather, can he see me staring at him? Does he know I am trying to connect? Is he even interested? Does he know me? Do I know him? Who of the two is more real? Who has his feet more firmly planted on the ground? Or, let’s turn it around and give this thought a further torsion: when, one hundred years from now, my great-grandson looks at a picture of me as I’m sitting by the statue of Memory in Straus Park at 106th Street, will he even know that I existed once and that in that picture an infinitesimal part of me was already desperately trying to reach out to him?
Or let me twist this around a bit further yet: as I’m looking at John Sloan’s painting of Greenwich Village, with the elevated train very much in evidence, and then examine his incipient studies of it, I notice that one of these sketches doesn’t even show the El at all. Sloan is as though remembering Sixth Avenue before the El was ever built, with a prescient eye cast on its eventual demolition. In his studies, Sloan is rehearsing the El that both is about to be built and has already been taken down.
What we’re looking for, what we’re trying to grasp, is not there, will never be there; yet looking for just that thing is what makes us turn to art. As we attempt to understand our lives, ourselves, and the world around us, art is not about things but about the interrogation, the remembrance, the interpretation, perhaps even the distortion of things, just as it is not about time but about the inflection of time. Art sees footprints, not feet, luster, not light, hears resonance, not sound. Art is about our love of things when we know it’s not the things themselves we love.
As I look at my volume of New York Then and Now, I am reminded of the ultimate paradox: that those who were alive in a photograph taken a century ago are all dead, but that if the city lives on and scarcely changes, then perhaps those who walked the streets a century ago have just changed clothes, bought newer cars, and all come back to us, because if the city never really ages, we don’t age, and we don’t die.
I stare at John Sloan’s picture and see the city in 1822, when there was no El, in 1922, when indeed there was one, and in 2022, when the memory of the El will long since have faded. And suddenly I am struck by one scary thought. That I’m absent from all three of them! But then I think of Bleecker Street with its gas jets and its shoppers and its stores that are just about to close for the evening, and I know that I’ve always been there and thus might never, ever leave.
EVENINGS WITH ROHMER
Maud; or, Philosophy in the Boudoir
April 1971. I am twenty years old. My life is about to change. I don’t know it yet. But just a few more steps and something new, like a new wind, a new voice, a new way of thinking and seeing things will course through my life
.
It’s a Thursday evening. I have no papers due tomorrow, no reading, no homework. I still have my daily ration of Ancient Greek passages to translate, but I can always take care of these tonight or tomorrow morning on the long subway ride to school. This, I realize, is another one of those very rare, liberating moments when I’ve got nothing hanging over me. I was right to leave work before it got dark today: it’s a perfect evening for a movie. Tonight, I want to see a French film. I want to hear French spoken. I miss French. I would have preferred going to the movies with a girl, but I don’t have a girlfriend. There was someone, or the illusion of someone, a while back, but it never worked out, and then someone else came along, and that didn’t work out either. Since then, I’ve grown to hate loneliness and, more than loneliness, the self-loathing it stirs up.
But tonight I am not unhappy. Nor am I in a rush to find a movie theater. After working all afternoon in that dingy machinery shop in Long Island City, where I was lucky to find a job, because my boss is a German Jewish refugee who likes to hire other displaced Jews, I want to hurry back to the city, get out of the subway, and take in the busy luster of lights of Midtown Manhattan’s twilit avenues. They always remind me of J. Alden Weir’s spellbinding Nocturnes of New York, or of Albert Marquet’s nights in Paris—not the real New York or the real Paris, but the idea of New York and Paris, which is the film, the mirage, the irrealis figment each artist projects onto his city to make it his, to make it more habitable, to fall in love with it each time he paints it, and, by so doing, to let others find an imaginary dwelling in his unreal city. I’ve always liked this illusory Manhattan glazed over the real Manhattan, altering it just enough to make me want to love it. Being in Midtown now feels so much better than heading directly home to emerge from the drab subway station on Ninety-Sixth Street and Broadway and walking up a dark, sloping Ninety-Seventh Street, where the occasional roadkill reminds me that this modern megalopolis could just as easily be a gigantic culvert. Nothing could be further from either Pissarro’s or Hopper’s beloved cities. Scuzzy Ninety-Seventh Street is the last thing I want tonight.