IIOW TRUE TO LIFE IS BIOGRAPHY?
41
Egypt is my catalyst; I break down life in Egyptian units, the way
archaeologists cut up the temple of Denclur in numbered blocks to be
put together...anywhere else.
Perhaps it was to case the feeling of loneliness and estrangement on
Riverside Drive that morning with my father that I imagined a similar
scene on the beaches of Alexandria during that magical Sunday hour in
the morning.
I so envied these people on the grassy incline who probably lived
nearby and who kept bringing iced tea from their homes in the sur–
rounding prewar buildings, who knew who they were, and who they
were likely to become, and who seemed so thoroughly grounded in the
present. I wanted nothing more than to be lifted from where I stood and
be one of them, leave my time scheme and join theirs. Instead, I took
these people on the grassy incline and brought them back with me to my
imaginary Egypt, made them my friends, and drank cold lemonade with
them on the beaches of my teens and with them walked along the sand
dunes, and to drive the point home, I even had one of them turn to me
and say, as I' d told my father that day, "This is a perfect beachday
morning, isn't it?"
Ultimately, what I remembered while writing
Out
of
Egypt
was not
our life at the beach, but the fiction I had invented that day of our life
at the beach.
Indeed, the parts of
Ollt
of
Egypt
that matter to me the most are nor
those set in Egypt, but those where the solitary, awkward, inadequate
narrator goes looking in Europe and America for the remains of Egypt.
He yearns for Egypt, but he doesn't even yearn for it the way those who
enjoyed life in Egypt sometimes miss Egypt. They almost never long for
the past; they deride the very notion of remembrances of things past.
They've always been anchored in life, in the things of the here-and-now,
and now that they arc elsewhere, this is where they claim and have
staked their lives. The narrator of
Out
of
Egypt,
on the other hand, has
a liquid and unsteady foothold. It is not even Egypt or the things he
remembers that he loves; what he loves is just remembering, because
remembering insures that the present won't ever prevail. Remembering
is merely a posture that turns its head away and, in the process, even
when there is nothing to remember, is shrewd enough to make up mem–
ories, surrogate, stand-by memories, if only to justify not having to look
straight at the present.
Alexandria, as Lawrence Durrell once wrote, may very well be the
capital of memory. But Alexandria wouldn't exist if memory hadn't
invented it.
