38
PARTISAN REVIEW
Temporizing comes to the present the long way around, the way
some people come to love, counterintuitively. Some seize today on con–
dition they'll come back to it tomorrow. Some reach out for what life
throws their way provided they come close enough
to
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 which 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 re-inventing your life is life, is the present.
And when you have doubts, simply saying how frail is our 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
unsu ited and unprepared we are to live our own lives, we do not neces–
sarily 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
to
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. By the time I
was forry I was ready
to
dare things I was unprepared for at twenty; at
fifty I was finally eager
to
live my thirties. At twenty-five, I longed
to
meet the girls I'd known at sixteen. At sixteen, of course, I couldn't wait
to be twenty. At twenty, thirty seemed the ideal age. At sixty, seventy,
eighty, there will be plenty of time for new beginnings.
One measures time not in units of experience, but in units of hope
and of anticipated regret.
One reason why 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) hut that I need to feel that
such-and-such a place has lost its presence, that it has become unavail–
able, or that I might never see it again. I am walking its streets and yet,
for the purposes of the a rticle I ha ve been sent
to
write and ha ve
promised
to
submit as soon as I return
to
the United States, I must pre–
tend 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....
