A Man Out of Time

Rootedness in time has always been a serious matter. I try to gauge the vintage of a movie or an unfamiliar piece of music, and when I recall a long-ago piece of personal history it usually comes with a month or at least a year, and sometimes a precise date, attached. Context accompanies memories -- geography and season. My wife is impressed with my long-term recall (less so with the short-term), but thinking of the past provokes in me a sense of vertigo, a free fall into a metaphysical abyss, a temporal counterpart to Jimmy Stewart’s spatial sickness in Vertigo. For as long as I can remember, the antidote has been pinning events to settings, and then events to other events because memory implies narrative, real or imagined. I unexpectedly found a diagnosis of my condition in 1995, when Knopf published the Sophie Wilkins translation of The Man without Qualities, by Robert Musil:

“Lucky the man who can say `when,’ `before,’ and `after”! Misfortunes may have befallen him, or he may have writhed in agony: but as soon as he is capable of recounting the events in their chronological order he feels as well content as if the sun were shining straight on his diaphragm.”

Instinctively, that’s how my mind works. It has turned me into a taxonomist of memory. Even that long, delicious reading of Musil’s masterpiece is attached to a specific place and time, and thinking of it brings back my job at the time, my underheated apartment, its mustiness and cracked linoleum, the couch and lamp.