HOW TRUE TO LIFE IS BIOGRAPHY?
35
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 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 bet–
ter times. To rephrase this somewhat: he look s 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 paill, 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 pre–
sent. 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 self-same
sorrows, or rather in crafting elaborate ways back to them, that Leop–
ardi the poet came upon his only source of joy.
Temporizing, in this context, is not just a strategy for material or psy–
chological survival in a world perceived as hostile but it 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 here-and, here, let me broach the third "way" to which
I
alluded earlier:
Is temporizillg an aesthetic moue? Call one speak of all
aesthetics of tel11/)()rizillg?
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 sec. Either way, a temporizer has a con–
sciousness 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 hc thinks they are, and what people swear
to seldom holds over timc. One could push this description further: the
