Homo Irrealis

by André Aciman

  Almost reminds the fiction writer that he is just that: writing fiction, not journalism. How can he know for certain whether X was really in love with Y? One could almost guess that he was. But who is to know? “That night, X caught himself almost thinking of Y without her clothes on.” Did he actually think of her naked, or is the writer trying to make the reader consider something that may never have been thought of at all? Almost speaks a writer’s reluctance vis-à-vis here-and-now, hard-and-fast, nuts-and-bolts, tooth-and-nail, bare-bones, in-your-face factoids.

  Almost teases. It is not a yes or a no; it is almost always a maybe. Almost withholds definitive knowledge of things and suggests the provisional nature of everything found in a narrative, including, of course, the narrator’s own knowledge of the facts he’s been narrating. A cautious narrator uses almost almost as a way of vouchsafing his honest attempt to capture a particular essence on paper. Almost guarantees him an out. Almost not only allows an author to suggest that he might at any moment withdraw or revoke anything he’s put on paper, but it is also an elusive loophole that doesn’t always want to be noticed.

  Almost is not the favorite word of all authors. One can imagine—though no one’s counting—that Hemingway was not a friend of almost. It’s not a word alpha males are disposed to use. It suggests timidity, not assertion; recession, not dominance.

  But then there are writers who with an almost, or a presque in French, can suddenly illuminate a reader’s universe. Here is a sentence from La Princesse de Clèves: “She asked herself why she had done something so perilous, and she concluded that she had embarked on it almost without thinking.”

  Had she really not thought of it, or had she thought of it but didn’t want to admit it? The author, Madame de La Fayette, herself doesn’t seem to know or want to know. She wants her character to seem a touch more guileless than might seem appropriate. After all, the Princesse de Clèves is a model of virtue.

  But there is something else happening with the use of the word. It reflects a worldview where nothing is certain and where all things written can be rescinded or taken to mean the very opposite, or almost the very opposite.

  I am an almost writer. I like the ambiguity, I like the fluidity between hard fact and speculation, and I may like interpretation more than action, which might explain why I prefer a psychological novel to a straightforward page-turner. One leaves things perpetually insoluble; the other is an open-and-shut case. Think of Stendhal, Dostoyevsky, Austen, Ovid, Svevo, Proust. I turn to the word almost because it allows me to think more, to open more doors, to steer boldly and yet safely, to keep excavating and interpreting, to fathom the very recesses of the human mind, of the human heart, and of human desire. It gives me an out in case I have strayed too far.

  There is not a page I write where the word almost doesn’t slip in to mollify and mitigate anything I say. It is my way of undoing what I write, of casting doubt on anything I write, of remaining uncertain, untethered, unmoored, unaligned, because I have no boundaries. Sometimes I think I am all shadow.

  And perhaps I almost don’t know what the word almost really means.

  COROT’S VILLE-D’AVRAY

  On a late November morning years ago, we crossed Central Park. I remember the bare trees along the way and the glacial air and the sodden earth underfoot, and I remember unleashed dogs scampering about in the mist with steam rising from their snouts while their owners stood jittering, rubbing their palms. When we reached Fifth Avenue, we scraped the mud off our shoes, entered the Frick Collection, and, before we knew it, were facing Corot’s Ville-d’Avray and moments later Corot’s Boatman of Mortefontaine, followed by Corot’s Pond. I had seen the paintings several times before, but this time, perhaps because of the weather, I realized something I’d never considered. I was about to tell my friend that Corot had captured Central Park perfectly, that looking at the boatman in the paintings reminded me of the scene we’d just left behind by the deserted boathouse on Seventy-Second Street, when I realized that I had gotten things entirely in reverse. It was not that Corot reminded me of the park, but that if the park meant anything to me now, it was because it bore the inflection of Corot’s subdued melancholy. Central Park suddenly felt more real to me and was more stirring, more lyrical, and more beautiful because of a French painter who’d never even set foot in Manhattan. I liked the cold weather more now, the dogs, the scrawny trees, the damp and barren landscape that no longer felt late autumnal but that was starting to glow with peculiar reminders of early spring. New York as I’d never seen it before.

  But just as I was about to explain this reversal, I began to see something else. I remembered the Ville-d’Avray I had visited as a young man, years earlier, in France, and how I’d been struck by its beauty, not because of the town and its natural environs but because of Serge Bourguignon’s depiction of it in his 1962 film Les dimanches de la Ville-D’Avray (a.k.a. Sundays and Cybele). Now the film too was imposing itself on Corot and on New York, and Corot himself was being projected back onto the film. Only then did I realize that what truly attracted me to the paintings was something I’d never observed before. It explained why—despite all these mirrorings and reversals and despite the sky verging on the gray and the untended landscape over which hovered Corot’s muted lyricism—what I loved in each painting and what had suddenly buoyed my mood was a mirthful spot of red on the boatman’s hat. That hat caught my attention like an epiphany on a gloomy day in the country. Now it’s what I come to see each time I’m at the Frick, and it’s why I love Corot. It’s the tiny baby in the king cake, like a subtle hint of lipstick on a stunning face, like an unforeseen afterthought, the mark of genius that reminds me each time that I like to see other than what I see until I notice what’s right before me.

  UNFINISHED THOUGHTS ON FERNANDO PESSOA

  The story exists in countless versions. A painter is hired to portray the life of Christ. So he roams the country in search of the most angelic-looking boy. Eventually he finds him, paints him, and then for years plods through countless towns and villages in search of models for each of the disciples. And, one by one, he finds them: James, Peter, John, Thomas, Matthew, Philip, Andrew, et al. Finally the last one remains to be painted: Judas. But he can’t find anyone who looks as awful as the Judas he has in mind. By now the painter is quite aged and doesn’t even remember who had commissioned the painting or if that person is still alive to pay him for his work. But the painter is headstrong, and one day, outside a tavern, he spots the most debauched, seedy-looking, bedraggled vagabond who is clearly given to drinking, lechery, and thieving, if not worse. The painter offers him a few coins and asks if he would sit for him. “I will,” replies the man with a sinister smirk on his face. “But give me the coins first,” he says, proffering a filthy hand. The painter does as he’s told and pays the man. The hours pass. “Whom are you painting?” the vagabond asks. “Judas,” replies the painter. After hearing the painter’s answer, the would-be Judas begins to weep. “Why are you crying?” asks the painter. “Years ago you painted me as Jesus,” says the man. “Now look and see what’s become of me.”

  Some versions of the story say the vagabond’s name was Pietro Bandinelli and that he sat for Leonardo’s Last Supper, first as Jesus and a while later as Judas. Others maintain that his name was Marsoleni and that Michelangelo painted him as the innocent-looking child Jesus and years later as Judas.

  I was thirteen or so at the time my father told me the story, and I remember that it made a powerful impression on me, leaving me feeling even stunned, as though my father had told me a tale not just about Jesus and Judas or about how time can totally undo who we think we are, but that the story was also about me in ways that I couldn’t begin to put into words. Yes, time happens to all of us, but the Jesus-Judas story struck me as a cautionary tale, almost an admonition, that I, like the boy Jesus, had a dissolute Judas inside me who could any moment slip out, take over, and lead me down an irreversible path. I was a boy, but I had Judas in me—I knew i
t, and, what made things worse, my father seemed to know it too.

  What moved me, and will continue to move anyone who hears this story, is that the passage of time could transform a person from an unsullied, uncorrupted, godlike boy into a thorough degenerate steeped in sin and damnation. Something about this tale clearly suggested a truth about an aspect of myself that I had never considered before: that I could easily turn, or that I was already turning and didn’t see it. I was already feeling guilty for acts I knew not a thing about, much less how to commit them.

  The man is no longer the person he used to be once, and yet he is still the same person. I was born to be this, but now I’ve become that, he says. The distance between Jesus the boy and Judas the traitor remains forever unbridgeable: past and present couldn’t be more different. That the man weeps in front of the painter implies that, however dissolute, he is not without guilt or shame. I could have continued being the boy I once was, but that was not to be. I can no longer become what I was meant to be. The question he means to ask is: Is there redemption for me? Which is another way of asking: How can I buy myself back? And the terrible answer lies in the painter’s silence: You were the unsullied boy Jesus, and you committed the worst act of murder ever recorded in man’s history: you’ve killed Jesus, you’ve killed the Son of God, you’ve killed the innocent boy you once were, you’ve killed yourself. Marsoleni, you’ve been dead for years.

  The boy who sat for the portrait had no idea who he’d become one day; he might even have been looking forward to his future adult years. The adult, however, wishes nothing more than to be taken back to a time in his life when he had no notion of who he’d turn into, when he was incapable of even thinking of the future. I’d rather go back to the darkness of unknowing, he says, than be who I’ve become. I’d rather go back, back, back to be nothing than be the child who’d be me one day.

  I want to be out of time.

  “I am nothing,” writes the poet Fernando Pessoa. “I’ll always be nothing.”

  * * *

  I am looking at a picture of myself at age fourteen. I am standing in the sun. I have a sense that a big change is about to occur in my family’s life, but I have no idea what the future holds—where will I be? who will I be? what hardships lie ahead? But today I envy the boy in the photograph. He is young, and there are many discoveries and joys ahead of him, especially those of the body, whose pleasures he seems to know nothing of yet. But there are also sorrows and defeats awaiting, and, worse yet, there will always be that swamp of boredom whose shores he’ll grow to know and even find comfort in when things fall apart. Perhaps he already knows—though I can’t be sure he does—that one day he’ll want to look back at the time when this photo was taken. Perhaps he is already rehearsing a ritual that may not quite be in place yet.

  Ritual, I wrote earlier, is when we look back and repeat what has already happened, either because the past can bring solace or because we’re still trying to repair something and can do so only by repeating it. Rehearsal, on the other hand, is when we repeat what has yet to happen. Behind these two terms skulk their two shadow partners: regret and remorse. Remorse is when we desperately wish to undo what we’ve already done; regret, when we wish we had done or said something that we feared might cause remorse. Nostalgia for what never happened.

  This is an irrealis moment, and I find it everywhere in the genius of Pessoa. “Regret, right now, for the regret I’ll have tomorrow for having felt regret today,” which is a form of anticipated nostalgia, but a “nostalgia for what never was,” “for things that never existed,” hence, “false nostalgias.” In Richard Zenith’s translation of Pessoa,

  The leaves’ tattered shadows, the birds’ tremulous song, the river’s long arms shimmering coolly in the sun, the greenery, the poppies, and the simplicity of sensations—even while feeling all this, I’m nostalgic for it, as if in feeling it I didn’t feel it.

  Writing further in The Book of Disquiet: “I love you the way I love the sunset or the moonlight: I want the moment to remain, but all I want to possess in it is the sensation of possessing it.” Almost Proustian.

  As if he were the victim of a blockage, Fernando Pessoa’s narrator is always searching for something other, for something more, for the sensation of sensation, for thinking about thinking, for that sense of time that time never grants anyone. “There’s a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can’t touch it.” The shadow of the shadow, the echo of the echo, the essence of time and experience that always seems to elude us each time we wish to savor it.

  I’ve always belonged to what isn’t where I am and to what I could never be … I’m never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don’t know who’s seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul [Sinto-me expulso da minha alma] …

  To realize that who we are is not ours to know, that what we think or feel is always a translation, that what we want is not what we wanted, nor perhaps what anyone wanted—to realize all this at every moment, to feel all this in every feeling—isn’t this to be foreign in one’s own soul, exiled in one’s own sensations [Estraneiro na própria alma, exilado nas próprias sensações]?

  From dealing so much with shadows, I myself have become a shadow in what I think and feel and am. My being’s substance amounts to a nostalgia for the normal person I never was. That, and only that, is what I feel. I don’t really feel sorry for my friend who’s going to be operated on … I only feel sorry for not being a person who can feel sorrow … I try to feel, but I no longer know how. I’ve become my own shadow, as if I’d surrendered my being to it … I suffer from not suffering, from not knowing how to suffer. Am I alive or do I just pretend to be? Am I asleep or awake? A slight breeze that coolly emerges from the daytime heat makes me forget everything. My eyelids are pleasantly heavy … It occurs to me that this same sun is shining on fields where I neither am nor wish to be … From the midst of the city’s din a vast silence emerges … How soft it is! But how much softer, perhaps, if I could feel!

  Sensation or, better yet, the consciousness of sensation is what is absent. Elsewhere Pessoa writes:

  In this moment I feel strangely far away. I’m on the balcony of life, yes, but not exactly in this life. I’m above it, looking down on it. It lies before me, descending in a varied landscape of dips and terraces towards the smoke from the white houses of the villages in the valley. If I close my eyes, I keep seeing, because I’m not really seeing. If I open them I see no more, because I wasn’t seeing in the first place. I’m nothing but a vague nostalgia, not for the past nor for the future but for the present—anonymous, unending, and unintelligible.

  What he craves is a surplus of consciousness that arrests and supplements experience and time, but at the price of overriding and therefore of inhibiting time and experience. We want to be conscious of consciousness, to have more than what experience yields, to be in time, not before or after time—and to know it. But this is not possible. The twilight of consciousness is the price for overreaching the limits of consciousness. As La Rochefoucauld writes, “The biggest fault of insight [pénétration] is not to get to the point, but to bypass it.”

  To be cast away from a place is not difficult to narrate, but to be adrift in time is a curse few writers have ever dwelled on. “I miss the future when I’ll be able to look back and miss all of this, however absurdly,” writes Pessoa. Elsewhere in the same book, he adds:

  I feel banished from my soul. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so that I can write that I felt it. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I.

  How much I’ve lived without having lived! How much I’ve thought without having thought! I’m exhausted from worlds of static violence, from adventures I’ve experienced without moving a muscle. I’m su
rfeited with what I’ve never had and never will, jaded by gods that so far don’t exist. I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided. My muscles are sore from all the effort I never even thought of making.

  All critics who have written about Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet feel obligated to examine the author’s heteronyms, the multiple identities he assumed as a writer by giving each voice in his work a different author. This subject has never interested me, and I am pushing it aside. I am interested in his conscious inability to set his feet in one time zone. Instead, he inhabits and is inhabited by an irrealis mood.

  It was hard to remember yesterday or to believe that the self who lives in me day after day really belongs to me.

  The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones [meios tons da consciência] of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset [um eterno sol-pôr] of what we are. We feel ourselves to be a deserted field at dusk, sad with reeds next to a river without boats, its glistening waters blackening between wide banks.

  I imagine myself living for a moment in each house I pass, each chalet, each isolated cottage whitewashed with lime and silence—happy at first, then bored, then fed up. And as soon as I’ve abandoned one of these homes, I’m filled with nostalgia for the time I lived there. And so every trip I make is a painful and happy harvest of great joys, great boredoms, and countless false nostalgias.

  If one day they happen to look at these pages, I think they will recognize what they never said and will be grateful to me for so accurately interpreting not only what they really are but also what they never wished to be nor ever knew they were.