34
PARTISAN REVIEW
done throughout history; but like the Marranos in Spain, to win time,
members of my family decided to convert
to
Christianity; others
stopped going to temple. Unable or unwilling to leave, they too went
under.
I am tempted to ca ll Marranism temporizing because what I want to
lay bare here is not so much the unavoidable connection between the
two but what one could tentatively ca ll a form of"Marranism of time."
A Marrano, after all, is someone who practices two faiths simultane–
ously: one in secret, another in the open. Similarly, an exile is a person
who is always in one place but elsewhere as well. An ironist is someone
who says one thing but means another. A hypocrite is someone who
upholds one thing but practices another. An arbitrageur is someone who
buys in one market and sells in another. A temporizer is someone who
exists in two time zones but who, for this very reason, does not exist in
either. He has stepped out of time. The temporizer lives like others, with
others, perhaps better than others-except that, like the Marranos in
Spanish churches or like me in Egypt saluting the Egyptian flag every
morning at school, knowing it represented anti-Semitism in its foulest
manifestation, the temporizer lets time happen without being part of it.
He is not touched-or hurt-by time. He lives in abeyance.
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
J
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 round–
about 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, docs 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 some–
thing better. In effect, he wants to alter, reorganize, and reconfigure his
own life and, by so doing, forestall those things he fears most.
This, in fact, is what one docs when one burrows in a cork-lined room
all day for days, for months, for years, re-inventing a life for oneself. By
so doing, one renounces time, transcends time, aetherealizes 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
