Alibis

by André Aciman

  Now, temporizing may be a historical necessity and of interest to intellectual historians, even to those interested in the fate of the Jews of the Middle East, but it is not what I’m really after. What I am trying to explore is not the historical temporizer but, for want of a better term, the psychological temporizer—who defers, denies, disperses the present, who accesses time (life, if you wish) so obliquely and in such roundabout ways and gives the present so provisional and tenuous a status that the present, insofar as such a thing is conceivable, ceases to exist, or, to be more accurate, does not count. It is unavailable. He is out of sync with it. By abstracting himself from the present, by downgrading it, what he gets in exchange is an illusory promise of security away from pain, sorrow, danger, loss. He forfeits the present because it’s not what he wants it to be, because he may not know what to do with it, because he wants something else, because he is working or holding out for something better. In effect, he wants to alter, reorganize, and reconfigure his own life and, by so doing, forestall those things he fears most.

  This is what one does when one burrows in a cork-lined room all day for days, for months, for years, reinventing a life for oneself. By so doing, one renounces time, transcends time, etherealizes time. For all he knows, such a person, such a writer, may have been fending off the present all his life, so that a retelling of that life, however altered the account may be, constitutes not only a temporizing act—it will keep the author so busy that he won’t be able to leave his room—but it itself is also a narrative about a psychological temporizer. Proust’s novel is about a man who looks back to a time when all he did was look forward to better times. To rephrase this somewhat: he looks back to a time when what he looked forward to was perhaps nothing more than sitting down and writing … and therefore looking back.

  What gives meaning to a life so clearly inscribed in temporizing is not someone’s ability to confront pain, sorrow, or loss, but rather someone’s ability to craft ways around pain, sorrow, loss. It is the craft that makes life meaningful, not the life itself. This, clearly, is a bookish concern and a bookish solution. Yet it is only by removing life from the present, or from what Proust called the tyrannie du particulier, from the tyranny of day-to-day, hard-and-fast, here-and-now, nuts-and-bolts facts, that by a sort of detour the temporizer will access time and experience. What stands between him and life is not his fear of the present; it is the present. I could mention Proust again but it is the poet Leopardi who comes most vividly to mind: his moments of true happiness were not in “lived” life. That was never given to him, since Leopardi’s life was, as he saw it, a tissue of undiminished sorrows. It was in remembering these selfsame sorrows, or rather in crafting elaborate ways back to them, that Leopardi the poet came upon his only source of joy.

  Temporizing, in this context, is not just a strategy for material or psychological survival in a world perceived as hostile but also becomes a form of consciousness. And by consciousness I don’t even mean what kind of good or bad conscience do temporizers have, or how can one go on being who one is and at the same time temporize and be, as the saying goes, “not altogether there.” Rather, the question I would like to address—and, here, let me broach the third “way” to which I alluded earlier: Is temporizing an aesthetic move? Can one speak of an aesthetics of temporizing? A temporizer may very well be a hypocrite with a good conscience or a sincere man with a bad one; his face and the mask he wears are not identical, or his face could very well be the only mask he or others will ever see. Either way, a temporizer has a consciousness of being other, of not being in sync with who he is or with who others think he is. He is other than who he is because his “timing” is not like everyone else’s.

  Everything about him is shifty. The place he calls home could easily stop being his, just as his possessions could easily be taken away. Those he loves are other than who he thinks they are, and what people swear to seldom holds over time. One could push this description further: the temporizer even treats those closest to him already as people whom he will unavoidably lose. To buffer the blow, which he knows must come, he rehearses and steels himself to their loss while they’re still very much in his life. He looks at his grandmother and sees the dead woman she is likely to be soon; he looks at his mistress and already sees his “sweet cheat gone.” He is taking a distance that life itself has by no means made necessary. He is mourning someone who is still alive, the way he’ll find ways to feel jealous of someone he has long since ceased to love. He regrets what he hasn’t lost or, for that matter, isn’t even in possession of to worry he might lose it one day.

  I am, of course, thinking of Proust. And yet this is the irony with Proust. Marcel always wishes he could have anticipated losing someone; for then, he thinks, he would have suffered less. Similarly, he always wishes his mind could catch up with his wishes when they’re about to be realized, for then, so he thinks, he would maximize his pleasure. These, however, are merely strategies for managing the unmanageable intensity of the present, for rehearsing, for “scripting” the present. Caught unprepared, Proust’s protagonist is either totally disabled or totally devastated. When Albertine is finally willing to offer herself to Marcel, Marcel prefers to take a rain check instead. When Marcel has finally overcome what seemed like mild grief over his grandmother’s death, he is suddenly caught by a spasm so violent as he bends down to tie his shoelaces that he bursts out crying.

  Everything in Proust’s universe aims to prevent similar outpourings. His temporizing antics aim to diffuse experience, to make experience unavailable, to thwart experience in the real world unless it has first passed through what one could call a literary time filter. His whole life is spent crafting that filter. One can see this even in his sentences: they are prototypically crafted to do one thing best of all: to temporize. They throw their net ever wider, waiting, never rushing, prodding, teasing, coaxing, luring, angling, as if something far greater, but whose character or profile the author still ignores and is certainly not about to disturb or risk losing by reaching too soon for it, is waiting for him at the end of the line at some hitherto unknown point in the future that, once we get to it, will—as is so typical of the span of each of Proust’s sentences—“shed a retrospective illumination” upon his entire work.

  Despite Proust’s shrewd and fretful comings and goings from one time zone to the other, Marcel, the character, is never prepared in time. He is always surprised by the unexpected, as though Proust were always reminding himself that no matter how cautiously Marcel shields himself and defers contact with the cruel world, the way Oedipus tried to avert his own fate, that world has an insidious way of slipping back in. Proust has made being clumsy or getting caught off guard—call it the Proustian slip—a veritable art form, a privileged moment indeed, because it is only inadvertently, by slipping, that Marcel encounters the present and, as he himself knows, life itself, with its pleasures, its dangers, and sorrows. And yet, the one thing Marcel wishes desperately to learn to do is precisely how to filter pleasure from its attendant dangers and sorrows. He should learn how to distrust more, take his distance, never be so hasty or so zealous in wanting things now and only now. The lesson he should learn is simple enough—and he’s made it an art form as well: what is should always be turned into a what seems; what seems must become what isn’t; and what isn’t, what was. This is how things acquire meaning—not vis-à-vis the real present, but before the higher court of something I’d like to call the imperfect-conditional-anterior-preterit: what was perhaps and might have been has more meaning than what just is. This is where Proust wishes to lodge all experience, and this is where la vraie vie occurs. Memory and wishful thinking are filters through which he registers, processes, and understands present experience. With temporizers, experience is meaningless—it is not even experience—unless it comes as the memory of experience, or, which amounts to the same, as the memory of unrealized experience. For Proust, it is only retrospectively, long after the present has slipped away, that one finally
sees the bigger picture. It is only when it’s too late that one comes to understand how close one came to bliss … or how needless our sorrows were when they drove us to despair. The following is by Emily Dickinson:

  Except the Heaven had come so near—

  So seemed to choose My Door—

  The Distance would not haunt me so—

  I had not hoped—before—

  But just to hear the Grace depart—

  I never thought to see—

  Afflicts me with a Double loss—

  ’Tis lost—And lost to me—

  Proust’s job is to throw experience back into the past and from there—let me use a verb I introduced earlier—yank it back from the future, retro-prospectively. This is what gives that unmistakable span, that spread to his sentences. In that spread, past and future and, by implication, present exist at the same exact time.

  Temporizing comes to the present the long way around, the way some people come to love, counterintuitively. Some seize today on condition they’ll come back to it tomorrow. Some reach out for what life throws their way provided they come close enough to almost lose it. And some elegize the past, knowing that what they truly love is not the past they’ve lost or the things they elegize and learn to think they love but their ability to speak their love for it, a love that may never have even been there but which is none other than the child of their ability to craft their way into some sort of imperfect-conditional-anterior-preterit. Writing, they seem to say, works. Writing will get you there. Burrowing in a cork-lined room reinventing your life is life, is the present.

  And when you have doubts, simply saying how frail is your hold on the present can become a gratifying act. Therein lies the true aesthetic of temporizing: by admitting, by showing that we do not know how to live in the present and may never learn to do so, or how thoroughly unsuited and unprepared we are to live our own lives, we do not necessarily make up for this inability. But we uncover a hitherto unsuspected surrogate pleasure: in making the realization of this unsuitability become a redemptive testimonial. Playing with the disconnect between all the possibilities implicit in the imperfect-conditional-anterior-preterit may be a highly dysfunctional move, and is only destined to backfire each time, but it also gives us our life back as … fiction.

  Indeed, the disconnect, the hiatus, the tiny synapse—call it once again the spread between us and time, between who we are and wish we might have been—is all we have to understand our place in life. One measures time not in units of experience but in increments of hope and anticipated regret.

  One reason I think I make a terrible travel journalist is that, as soon as I visit a place, I am totally unable to write about it. Not that I need to let things “simmer down” (as we say) but that I need to feel that such-and-such a place has lost its presence, that it has become unavailable, or that I might never see it again. I am walking its streets and yet, for the purposes of the article I have been sent to write and have promised to submit as soon as I return to the United States, I must pretend I am no longer on these very same streets. If I want to write I must pretend to remember. Writing outside of loss leaves me at a loss …

  * * *

  In a sentence from Out of Egypt I describe the sound of my deaf mother’s shriek, saying that it reminded me of the screech of tires coming to a sudden halt. Big tires. Bus tires.

  This, [my father] would find out one day, was the howl of the deaf, when the deaf are in pain, when the deaf quarrel, when they scream, when words fail them and nothing comes out but this sputter of shrieks that sounded more like a fleet of busses screeching to a halt on a quiet beachday Sunday than like the voice of the woman he had married.

  The part I would like to focus on for a second is not the yell itself but the “quiet beach-day Sunday” with which it is contrasted. Translators never get it right because it is untranslatable, because in principle it doesn’t even exist or make sense: what is a “quiet beach-day Sunday”?

  And yet if those quiet beach-day Sundays mean anything to me today and if, as so many Alexandrians have written to me after reading Out of Egypt, the idea of a quiet moment on Sundays just before crowds begin to head out to the beaches captures the very essence of life in Alexandria in very late spring or early summer, when summer beaches have not quite become the congested bedlam they invariably turn into by July but still retain the promise of magic to come in the weeks ahead—if all this means anything to me today, it is because it has far less to do with Alexandria than it does with how I’ve imposed Egypt on my present life in America. For this impression of a quiet beach-day Sunday was born not in Egypt, but in America one morning when I was walking with my father on Riverside Drive during our first year here and, seeing a group of twenty-year-olds sunbathing on a grassy incline off Ninety-eighth Street, turned to him and said, “This is a beachday, isn’t it?”

  I devoted about twenty pages of Out of Egypt to the description of an early Sunday morning at the beach. Then I closed that segment by relating how I frequently remembered these beach mornings with a friend in graduate school in Cambridge many years later. This memory, however, was born in New York City, was then shipped to Cambridge, then brought back to New York, where, many years later still, I eventually wrote Out of Egypt and, by so doing, finally dispatched this entire entassement and imbrication of cities to an imagined Alexandria.

  Egypt is just the grid, the matrix, the cavity into which I “throw back” my life long after leaving Egypt. My present is meaningless unless it is thrown back to Egypt. One could say that all of my impressions of Egypt are no more than scattered pieces of my life out of Egypt strung together and thrown back into a narrative thread I’ve decided to call Egypt. Seeing Egypt, not America, is how I see America. I see the present provided it’s like the past, becomes the past. When I went back to visit Egypt after publishing Out of Egypt, all I could think of, or kept trying to think of, was New York—a place that used to loom like a distant future for me when I was a boy but that had suddenly become my present only when I wasn’t present in it! Egypt, however, the Egypt I had for so many decades dreamed of, was not once before me.

  My impulse when I see something beautiful or moving or even something I desire in the here and now is to throw it back to Egypt, to see if it fits back there, if it isn’t yet another one of those myriad missing pieces that belongs there or that should be brought back there, or that should be made to seem to have originated there, as though for something to make sense to me it has to have roots that go all the way back to Egypt, as though the act of piecing Egypt back together, of reconstructing and restoring even an imaginary Egypt out of this scatter of impressions in New York were an interminable restoration project whose purpose is to prevent all contact with the present, so that anything I encounter that strikes me must, in one way or another, correspond to something Egyptian, have an Egyptian coefficient, or else mean absolutely nothing. Things that do not have an Egyptian analog do not register, have no narrative. Things that happen in the present without echoing even an imaginary past do not register either. They cease to exist. They do not count. There are interminable stretches of New York that do not exist for me: they don’t have Egypt, they have no past, they mean nothing. Unless I can forge an Egyptian fiction around them, if only as a mood I recognize as Egyptian, they are as dead to me as I am dead to them.

  Egypt is my catalyst; I break down life in Egyptian units, the way archaeologists cut up the temple of Dendur in numbered blocks to be put together … anywhere else.

  Perhaps it was to ease the feeling of loneliness and estrangement on Riverside Drive that morning with my father that I imagined a similar scene on the beaches of Alexandria during that magical Sunday hour in the morning.

  I so envied these people on the grassy incline who probably lived close to the park and who kept bringing iced tea from their homes in the surrounding prewar buildings, who knew who they were, and who they were likely to become, and who seemed so thoroughly grounded in the present. I wanted not
hing more than to be lifted from where I stood and be one of them, leave my time scheme and join theirs. Instead, I took these people on the grassy incline and brought them back with me to my imaginary Egypt, made them my friends, and drank cold lemonade with them on the beaches of my teens and with them walked along the sand dunes, and to drive the point home, I even had one of them turn to me and say, as I’d told my father that day, “This is a perfect beach-day morning, isn’t it?”

  Ultimately, what I remembered while writing Out of Egypt was not our life at the beach but the fiction I had invented that day of our life at the beach.

  Indeed, the parts of Out of Egypt that matter to me the most are not those set in Egypt but those where the solitary, awkward, inadequate narrator goes looking in Europe and America for the remains of Egypt. He yearns for Egypt, but he doesn’t even yearn for it the way those who enjoyed life in Egypt sometimes miss Egypt. They almost never long for the past; they deride the very notion of remembrances of things past. They’ve always been anchored in life, in the things of the here and now, and now that they are elsewhere, this is where they claim and have staked their lives. The narrator of Out of Egypt, on the other hand, has a liquid and unsteady foothold. It is not even Egypt or the things he remembers that he loves; what he loves is just remembering, because remembering ensures that the present won’t ever prevail. Remembering is merely a posture that turns its head away and, in the process, even when there is nothing to remember, is shrewd enough to make up memories—surrogate, standby memories—if only to justify not having to look straight at the present.