Essays from the Nick of Time

by Mark Slouka

  I held off until 2003, stubbornly sending and receiving my letters in envelopes, then bent to the prevailing winds. I say bent, not broke. I may yet bend back. In any case, I sent my first e-mail. A questionable friend plugged the machine into the wall (you’ll pardon me if I marvel at the ordinary for a moment), showed me how to tiptoe into and out of the labyrinth, and voilà!—there it was—a space in which to compose my note. Feeling oddly unsure of myself, I typed in a “Hello, just testing” kind of message, maneuvered the pointer to the “send” rectangle, and clicked the mouse, which shall forever be the thing with fur whose chaotic nest of lint and cloth and mattress stuffing containing six squirming babies the size and color of lima beans I found in my father’s typewriter in the writing shed one April when I was six, but never mind. And my message disappeared.

  I’ll confess to a certain exhilaration at first. I was the Gettysburg veteran in 1924, all shaky limbs and handlebar mustache, getting into a Model T. I’d sworn I’d never do it. And yet… the wind! The speed! So this was the new age I’d resisted so strenuously. It seemed relatively easy, undeniably convenient, faster than a speeding bullet. Often I’d get a reply to my first message while I was still composing the second, an odd feeling, as though the recipient and I had met somewhere in the dark over the Atlantic. I felt very modern, light, unburdened. I could reach out and tap someone on the shoulder whenever I damn well pleased. I could look up the e-mail addresses of people I had never spoken or written to (I didn’t have anyone particular in mind) and write them… something. Never mind what. Contact! Contact! That was the thing. So what if Thoreau’s exhortation had been aimed elsewhere?

  While I was waiting for my e-mails to materialize out of the ether, I took long walks through Prague and gravity began to reassert itself. To resist the flooding of the Vltava, the level of the Old Town had been raised by carting in tons of dirt from the countryside, in the process burying the town four meters underground. In some places one could still walk into the basements of buildings and find the outlines of stoned-in windows that half a millennium ago had swung out onto sunlight and rain, onto gardens and streets and courtyards. And something about the soil rising up over the doorstep, the window frame, the sill, burying worlds, moved me. When I passed a construction crew working on a broken water main by the harsh white light of halogen lamps one evening, I glimpsed, beneath the piping, old foundations and ancient sewers made of fist-sized stones and, beneath them, still other, deeper foundations. Everywhere I turned, I saw layer upon layer: stucco walls flayed to brick, brick giving way to stone, stone to a kind of gruel-like mortar. On the Charles Bridge, on the very same cobbles where tourists now bargained for Kafka cups and key chains, the Swedish dead had been piled two meters deep during the Thirty Years’ War. At the Church of Sts. Cyril and Metoděj, five minutes from my apartment, the Gestapo had laid out the bodies of the Czech paratroopers who had assassinated Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich. The crypt in which the seven young men had hidden themselves was still there, like a giant honeycomb, smelling of damp and plaster, riddled with bullets.

  Strophe and antistrophe. Back at the apartment, the children asleep or reading, I would plug the computer into the wall and wait for the screen to light up. Wait for the menu, click on the icon, listen to the signals dialing for access, press “enter,” then “enter” again. I found it difficult to resist. What if something required my attention? And sure enough—I had six unread messages. Or ten. When we went on a three-day trip to Moravia, where the snow in the forests had begun to melt and where we walked for hours listening to the sound of water running under shelves of ice, I returned home to twenty-three! I’d never felt so important in my life.

  Of course, the messages I received could hardly be called letters; the majority were something else: notes, afterthoughts, ephemera, doomed to their nanosecond, then floating away in the bitstream. And form followed function, by and large. This was the medium of the present tense, a world of dashes and ellipses, of missing salutations and truncated thoughts, of speed over content, speed over reflection, speed over everything. I found myself answering in kind, tapping out a line or two, getting done, and when I did take the time to write a letter-length message in which I actually described something, or speculated about someone, or recalled some time or other, it seemed forced, even unnatural. Simply put, history did not fit here. I was using the wrong tool for the job, hammering a nail with a putty knife, digging a trench with a file.

  We all accommodate the world differently, negotiate toward different ends. There is no universal Greenwich time for the soul. Some buy a new set of golf clubs; others find Jesus. Still others build bombs. My sense of true, of plumb, required a smaller adjustment. I bought a pen. And not just any pen, but a steel-nib pen, meant for dipping, and a good bottle of blue-black ink. And that evening when my wife and I returned from our walk, after I’d read to the kids and we’d put them to bed, I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote a letter. It took a while. The pen blotted or skipped. I dipped too much or not enough. My handwriting, like everyone else’s in the world, had gone to hell. I made a mess, smeared ink on my fingers, awkwardly crossed out what I couldn’t delete, compensated for afterthoughts with carets and arrows, grew irritated when the ink ran out midthought or midsentence.

  But it felt right, somehow. Appropriate. Perhaps even necessary. I learned how to hold the pen so the ink wouldn’t blot, so my Ls wouldn’t disappear on the downstroke. I learned how to dip the pen and touch the rim of the well with the nib just enough to draw the excess. I learned how to sense when the ink was running out, and dip in time. And I grew to love—don’t laugh, there is a kind of love we can feel for the things that suit us—the imposed slowness of it, the messy physicality of it, the complicated rhythm of write, dip, touch, think, write. I began to see the beauty of constraint, to appreciate the things it can force from us. I began to understand the shaping force that a less malleable medium can exert on us.

  A less malleable medium—it seems a fine metaphor for life. Maybe even a synonym. After all, didn’t we, each and every one of us, spend our years shaping the none-too-malleable mediums of opinion and power and love that surround us, and being shaped by them in turn? And weren’t we the men and women we were in large part because of how we had responded to the forces around us? How many of the things we did—falling in love, getting married and unmarried, having children and watching them grow at heartbreaking speed—were friction free?

  I continued taking my walks through Prague, listening to the sediments settle, like Joyce’s snow, over the living and the dead. And I continued writing my letters, both by nib and by byte, trying to understand what it was, precisely, that I found so nourishing about the one and so depleting in the other. Was it the “oldness” of the earlier technology that brought it into alignment with the city I lived in? No. One of the things I found least appealing about Prague was its hawking of its own history, the ubiquitous dates on cups and T-shirts and key rings, the way it kept licking and licking every ribbed vault and architrave until they were raw. An uncritical obsession with antiquity, I knew, could be as much a fetish as the new age’s obsession with newness.

  But if it wasn’t history I was after, what was it then? It came to me gradually, as insights will. I realized that what I found most compelling about the city I lived in was not just its inescapable verticality, the sudden scent of some other century on a street corner at dusk, but its arguments: the weedy battlements above the tennis courts, the fourteenth-century church between the Soviet-era warehouses, the rococo ornamentation on a facade above the KFC. The cobbles rising through the cracked cement.

  It was this seething, this dialogue, that I missed in the digital world. E-mail was a done deal. It was efficient. It was pleasant. It was, essentially, commercial. It was like the men and women in the tourist stalls along Pařižská Street, who could say please and thank you and we have a smaller one and here is your Visa card in English and Italian and French and German, but nothing else.
It was a conveyor belt, superbly designed to handle compact little parcels of information, disguised as communication. It was the cement.

  It’s night. The windows are open. The courtyard smells of lilacs and kerosene, knedliky and metal. And this is what I believe: that most of us, whether we realize it or not, live in a steel-nib world: slow, messy, full of all-too-visible deletions and clumsy afterthoughts. A Prague of sorts. We may hate it, find it absurd, long for some cleaner place. Perhaps we should. Perhaps it’s inevitable that we evolve away from who we are. But it’s what’s best about us.

  Speak, Video!

  1993

  I

  Let me begin with an observation on human nature so generally accepted it borders on truism: identity, both individual and cultural, is defined by one’s relation to the past. Whether we resist or embrace the past is relatively unimportant; either way history deals the featuring blow. If that is true, however (and there is overwhelming evidence—both mythic and empirical—that it is), then our ever-increasing ability to freeze time—to embalm the passing moment, as it were—is of vital importance.

  Every step in the evolution of technology designed to preserve and store the past—from the mnemonic iambic line to the development of writing, from the daguerreotype to the camcorder—has been a transgression on the territory of private memory. For millennia, after all, the passing of each generation was accomplished by a great dying-off of the past in all its particulars. The sights and smells and sounds of an entire lifetime—transcribeable, if at all, in only the most primitive, partial way—would pass into night with the individual consciousness that had experienced them. To a great extent, the slate was rubbed clean, and each generation could begin the process anew.

  That human beings have always fought this recurrent tide is not only true but inevitable. In many respects, I suppose, it is the desire to fight it that makes us human. To what extent we should succeed in our fight is another question. We have come a long way very quickly. Although we have been able to freeze visual images since the advent of photography midway through the nineteenth century, we tend to forget that it was not until 1935, for example, that we developed the ability to store information electromagnetically. With that first tape recorder—like beachcombers snatching shells from the surf—we could permanently save a world of sounds and voices from oblivion. Now, at the dawn of the video age, we stand ready to preserve the particularity of physical motion, the fluidity of individual expression, the unique juxtaposition of the aural and the visual.

  What our technology has tapped into, obviously, are a number of great and timeless human dreams—dreams so pervasive they border on cliché: to stop the flow of time; to relive moments from our past; to preserve, in ever-greater detail, our private histories; to perpetuate ourselves and those we love. These are things not easily resisted, and already there’s a vast and growing library of private moments. With every passing hour, the past takes up more of the present.

  I was born on the day the Soviets lofted Sputnik into space: technology’s child. But sensibilities, like obsolete organs or useless limbs, adapt slowly to new times. Real adaptation occurs over generations, not years or months. My unease over the prospect of vast video libraries of the dead, forever moving and talking and laughing in amber, must be understood for what it is: evidence of a sort of stunted psychic development, an evolutionary case of the bends. I’m not ready; I’m not sure any of us is. All traditions die hard, particularly the old and rooted ones, and at issue here is a cultural tradition as ancient as human consciousness: the tradition of giving over to death what rightfully belongs to it. To put it bluntly, I’ve lately had cause to wonder whether death should have some dominion.

  If experience teaches anything, it is that some dreams are best fulfilled slowly and carefully, others not at all. Our free fall into the video age bears watching. Or, to shift to a less ominous metaphor, the game may be fun but the rules are vague and the stakes impressive. What we risk altering is nothing less than the time-honored demarcation between life and death, the quality and the grain of private history, the privilege of memory, the right of revision, the balm of forgetting. A great tinkering has begun. We are playing at the psychological equivalent of genetic engineering, except that we are the scientists and our own minds are the frost-proof strawberries, the three-pound mice. None of this should be taken lightly.

  II

  There are times in every life when the past acquires a particular resonance, when we grow sensitive to sounds and voices normally beyond the range of hearing. The past shades into present always and everywhere, but only rarely do we acknowledge the process; only rarely does some trigger force us to recognize ourselves as citizens of that frontier.

  Last summer I spent two weeks carrying the past over a landscape bent on forgetting. In June I spent a rainy afternoon, evening, and night in the basement of my parents’ home in suburban Pennsylvania. After forty-six years of marriage, they had gone their separate ways. My mother acted out that most repressed of American dreams and returned to the old country, to streets and courtyards thick with memory, to the smells of cooked cabbage and knedliky, to the constant presence of companions both living and dead. My father chose to stay but moved out of the house. The past (an entire basementful) became my ward.

  I descended with a chair and a cup of coffee, naively confident that I’d be up before my wife put our son to bed. Eight months and three thousand miles later, I still haven’t completely emerged from that basement. Surrounded by the dim bulks of boxes outside the light’s circle, I sat up late into the night. Dispersed among the acquired mementos of several generations—the shells and stones and snake skins, the fishing lures and first-grade spellers, the children’s clothes stiff and delicate as parchment—were thousands upon thousands of photographs. Some were in boxes and envelopes, others haphazardly stacked in great, curling piles. Pictures in shoeboxes, pictures in jars. A handsome man in a First World War uniform smiled up from the bottom of an old tackle box, his teeth showing white in the shade of a summer oak. I descended and surfaced, regaining the present only to be drawn down again by the next photograph, the next letter or telegram.

  Hour followed hour. I struggled with great handfuls of letters, many still in their red and blue luftpost envelopes, the pages packed and densely scripted; with shoeboxes full of negatives; with piles and mounds of postcards, many featuring the five-heller stamps of Emperor Franz Josef that dated back to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Entire lives passed before my eyes. I was reminded of the way clouds gather and disperse in high-speed photography.

  The impression made by one postcard remains especially vivid. My great-uncle, a boy of sixteen, was a prisoner of war in Russia. On May 15, 1917, his sister Ludwa wrote him a brief note: “At noon today, Frantik Bacofske arrived and shot himself on their grave. He shot himself in the head but still talked. Before they got him to the hospital, he died. I’ll tell you about it in a letter. I don’t have time now. Till then, Ludwa.”

  And everywhere, gloriously random but threading the whole, the photographs—history and geography meshed as arbitrarily as though the entire dusty mass were some grand metaphor of the mind relaxing into second childhood. My mother in 1949, at the age of twenty-four, overlooking postwar Munich from St. Peter’s Church, the row of buildings to her right ripped open like a torn honeycomb. My father in 1952, shirtless, a handkerchief on his head and a bowl of paint in his hand, whitewashing the walls of some apartment in the slums of Sydney. My mother again, this time in 1928, a round-faced toddler on a sunny hillside in Moravia, staring suspiciously at the cameraman. Even me, at fifteen months, all drumbelly and baby fat, walking purposefully along the edge of some pond in the Catskills, so similar to the child already asleep upstairs as I write this that I thought for an instant a current photograph had slipped into these labyrinths by mistake. My great-grandfather, mustache exquisitely waxed, surrounded by women in white “Gibson girl” dresses—1903.

  Each photograph seemed ripe with
secrets; each face contained its own private catalog of fears and desires, of things seen and people loved and mistakes made. And above it all, carrying the not-unpleasant odor of old, dry books: the scent of mortality. Lives rose and fell like bubbles in a vat, and what remained was a tangled skein of connections, of links and intersections, a thrush’s nest in January.

  With the night edging toward dawn, I returned one more handful of photographs to the carton from which I’d taken them. The task I had set myself was impossible. I’d done nothing, and in two weeks we were moving to California, already terribly pressed for space. The cartons bulked large in the shadows, suddenly mute. My own past seemed to linger there with them. I turned and walked up the stairs. It was decided. We’d take them all with us.

  Driving west across the country at the wheel of an eighteen-foot U-Haul, with a car hitched to a tow dolly that made it literally impossible to back up, I was struck by the strange symbolism of it all. Here I was, after all, like some latter-day Puritan leaving the Egypt of the past, bound for the promise of a New Canaan. Westward was heaven, or rather heavenward was the west, as Henry David Thoreau had put it. I wanted freedom, forgetfulness, a new beginning. And yet I, apparently no less than John Winthrop aboard the Arabella in 1630, needed and nourished a link to the past. My ambivalence toward all those lives curled up against each other—riding in their envelopes behind me—was, I suspected, a particularly American sentiment.

  The very landscape confirmed this. Everywhere I looked, the past showed through like the ghostly outlines of wallpaper through paint. On one hand, the mini-marts and the shopping malls and the velvet paintings of Indian maidens with Anglo features—what Melville, in a less egalitarian age, had called “the vulgar caldron of an everlasting uncrystalizing Present.” On the other, signs of a great instability: Warsaw, Kentucky; Prague, Texas; Paris, Arkansas. The lesson seemed clear: the past was essential, inescapable. Canaan could not be Canaan without Egypt.