HOW TRUE TO LIFE IS BIOGRAPHY? 33
will go away. Ultimately, what it really says is this: if I kill myself a tiny
bit each day before you do, won't this obviate your need for killing me?
If
I stop my watch won't history stop its own? Like a submarine that
wants to appear hit, you leave a slick behind you. It may cost you
dearly, but everyone knows that what you leave for others to see is not
really vital; it is the slough you molted, the carapace, dead tissue, sepia,
decoy stuff. Time, however, has gone in hibernation-or, in the case of
crustaceans, in aestivation. Live tissue, live time is happening elsewhere.
That I am a descendant of Marranos, who temporized in Spain at
the time of the Inquisition invokes the second meaning of the word.
This time I came across it in, among others, Carlo Ginzburg'S book on
Nicodemism. Originally, I had looked into Nicodemism because I was
interested in the Counter-Reformation and its manifold handbooks on
the a
rt
of prudence and was pleased to discover thatCh ristia ns too
practiced their own variegated brands of Marranism. Among the books
quoted by Professor Ginzburg was one published in England, which I
also found in the OED as a citation from
1555:
"The Temporisour
(that is to say: the Observer of Tyme, or he that changeth with Tyme)."
Which suggests the other meaning of temporizing. To temporize not
only means to wait out something, but to compromise, to parley, to
delay taking a position; it means to waver, to adapt, to conform, to
evade, to shift, to fudge, to trim. To temporize is what you do when
you don't want to act, or when you can't act, or when you don't know
how to act, or when you are forced to act (or speak) in ways that are
not your own; you become evasive, deceptive. You trim. A trimmer is
a timeserver. One is of course reminded of George Savile's brilliant
Por–
trait of the Trimmer
in the seventeenth century. A timeserver tempo–
rizes. A timeserver is a double-dealer, a two-timer. A timeserver serves
two masters. A timeserver trims with time. The suggestion of deception
is inscribed in the very verb itself. As all sixteenth- and seventeenth–
century moralists knew so well, from Torquato Accetto in Italy, to Bal–
tasar Gracian in Spain, to Daniel Dyke in England (whose book was
widely read in La Rochefoucauld's circle), a temporizer was in essence
a hypocrite, an opportunist. A temporizer, like a trimmer, a schemer, or
an equivocator, is one who puts his true feelings, thoughts, religion, or
true identity aside while a storm is raging.
If
you cannot step elsewhere,
you go under, you turn the coat.
It would take no great stretch of the imagination to draw intimate
parallels between the two meanings of "temporizing" and apply them in
the most superficial manner to my life. In Egypt, my family could easily
see the storm brewing and hoped
to
wait it out, as Jews have always
