32
PARTISAN REVIEW
with the invasion of Carthage. Until this very day, fabius Maximus is
known in most schoolbooks as
the temporizer-the
more usual transla–
tion of ClIllctator-which means: he who waits out his enemy, who
makes time, who,
to
use a more current and pedestrian term, gives the
enemy time.
It
is also the first thing I learned when I was taught angling
as a boy. Let your adversary think he's safe, draw him in, cut him slack,
lure him until you've got him well and tight, then ... yank as hard as you
can.
It
is ironic that the victim of this strategy should himself have floun–
dered because of it:
Hannibal ante portas.
Hannibal stops before the
gates of Rome and puts off certain victory until. ..another time.
To "give time" is also a strategy by which the person put in an infe–
rior position tries to contend with a superior force. You would never
temporize with a weakling; you pommel a weakling, but you tire out a
giant. Here the endangered and threatened temporizer "waits his time,"
"bides his time," "plays for time," "gains time," "marks time." To tem–
porize means
to
do what is necessary
to
tide you over until a more favor–
able time comes. To temporize means
to
step out of time's continuum,
to
put time on hold, to stop time from happening,
to
open an epochal space.
You find a dimple in time and you burrow and hide in it and let real
time-or what others call real time-slide by you. You are, as one does
with modern watches, operating on two, perhaps more, time zones.
A temporizer procrastinates. He forfeits the present. He moves else–
where in time. Let me repeat these two definitions which I would like
to
propose at this time.
He forfeits the present
and
he moves elsewhere in
time.
He moves from the present
to
the future, from the past to the pre–
sent, from the present to the past, or, as I've already suggested in my
essa y "A rbitrage," he "fi rms up the present by experiencing it from the
future as a moment in the past."
I come to the verb
to temporize
in two ways, and both are indissol–
ubly fused
to
my life as a scholar of the seventeenth century and as a
memoirist of our times. The third way, the one
I'd
like to explore here
is, as you will doubtless see, a direct extrapolation of the first two.
First of all, I immediately latched onto the word because, as one says
of the children of Holocaust survivors, I am a child of temporizers. I was
born in Egypt in a Jewish family whose members saw the writing on the
wall but decided
to
wait out their foes. Don't do anything rash, put off
risking what you have for what you may never get, above all lie low–
all these are the mantras of congenital temporizers. They reflect a fear
of acting typical of those who are either temperamentally or materially
conditioned
to
prefer speculating rather than acting. It's the ruse of the
possum: if you do nothing, and danger sees
YOll
doing nothing, danger
