False Papers

I had long ago learned to prefer the imagined encounter, or the memory of the imagined encounter to the thing itself. Andre Aciman

There is the experience, but before that is the anticipation of the experience, and after that its memory, and don’t forget, there is also the place where the memory occurred, so that you often come to like the place where you recalled the experience, even more than the original experience itself.

This is the way Andre Aciman writes about his experiences in the 14 linked essays of False Papers. His subject is nostalgia and loss. Consider his essay “Letter from Illiers-Combray” (Combray is the fictional town created by Proust in In Search of Lost Time, while Illiers is where Proust’s father was born and where he used to visit as a child. To mark the centennial of Proust’s birth, the little town of Illiers officially changed its name to Illiers-Combray.) Aciman writes:

“Illiers itself was simply a place where the young Proust dreamed of a better life to come. But because the dream never came true, he had learned to love instead the place where the dream was born.”

Or in his essay “Shadow Cities” about a park (Straus Park) he discovered in New York. It was a small park, being restored in the Upper East Side. It reminded him of Alexandria in Egypt where he was born. He writes:

“I come to Straus Park to remember Alexandria, albeit an unreal Alexandria, an Alexandria that does not exist, that I’ve invented … Straus Park itself, now reminding me of something that is not just elsewhere but that is perhaps more in me than it ever was out there, that it is, after all, perhaps just me, a me that is no less a figment of time than this city is a figment of space.”

Or read this passage from another one of his essays. In it, he is speaking to a friend in Paris, while he is in New York, just before he is about to fly to Paris. He writes:

…I said I did not like traveling, I never found Paris relaxing, I would much rather stay in New York and imagine having wonderful dinners in Paris. “Yes, of course,” she agreed, already annoyed.” Since you’re going to Paris, you don’t want to go to Paris. But if you were staying in New York, you’d want to be in Paris. But since you’re not staying, but going, just do me a favor.”. Exasperation bristled in her voice. “When you’re in Paris, think of yourself in New York, longing for Paris, and everything will be fine.”

So it goes, from one essay to the next. I confess I rather like the Aciman’s roaming around, back and forth ambivalence and nostalgia. I also appreciate his view of the importance of putting this down on paper in order to record what is lost and what is recalled.

“Paper displaces place, the way writing displaces living.”

Writing in Circles

“You write not after you’ve thought things through; you write to think things through.”
Andre Aciman

An essay about the work of Andre Aciman by Teju Cole reminded me that some authors relish writing in circles.

I love being in Paris because when I am there, I dream about being in New York.

Yes, I love Alexandria but only because when I’m there, I can dream about what it is like in Rome.

When I am in Rome, I yearn only for the times I lived in Alexandria. And when I’m in Europe I miss the Egypt where I could dream of Europe

Those are paraphrases of the way Andre Aciman writes from time to time. His pleasure in meandering, almost contradictory sentences is, as Cole suggests, “intense and catching.”

Here is my favorite one, imaginary or otherwise, from a woman Aciman was hoping to see in Paris:

“Since you’re going to Paris, you don’t want to go to Paris. But if you were staying in New York, you’d want to be in Paris. But since you’re not staying, but going, just do me a favor. When you’re in Paris, think of yourself in New York longing for Paris, and everything will be fine.”

Yes, no, I do and I don’t, a way of expressing yourself that conveys the uncertainty and ambiguity of experience. The words circle back to the place you began as soon as you reach the place you were headed.

Once you become aware this writing style, you see it everywhere.

In her short story, “The Lost Order” published in The New Yorker (1/7/13) Rivka Galchen writes:

“I wasn’t happy about it. Although maybe I was happy about it.

“Although I don’t feel like I have a lot time, I feel constantly pressed for time, even though when I had a job I felt like I had plenty of time.”

One more example from a book I am rereading now, Joy Comes in the Morning, by Jonathan Rosen:

“I’d say the opposite is true,” said Lev. “Everything’s figured out.”

[Deborah said] “Yes, you’re right, too. The opposite is correct also.”

“You’re talking like the Talmud,” said Lev.

Why does this type of writing amuse me so much? Surely it is because it is the way I often think. Nothing is ever clear, nothing is without its contradictions and imperfections, certainty is largely unreachable and so I keep coming back to where I began. It’s like swimming laps.

Cole suggests the pleasure of reading Aciman “resides in the pleasure of his company. He knows a lot, and often gets carried away, but he also knows how to doubt himself.”

Essays on Elsewhere

The Egypt I craved to return to was not the one I knew, or couldn’t wait to flee, but the one where I learned to invent being somewhere else, someone else. Andre Aciman

Andre Aciman wanders around the labyrinth of his mind like a person who can’t find his way out of the Hampton Court maze. He tries one direction, it is blocked, turns around, goes back over the same route only to come to another dead end. Meanwhile, he wishes he was on the path over the next hedge and when he finally reaches it, he yearns to be back on the one he just left.

This is the way his essays are written. You have to enjoy this way of meandering around your synapses to enjoy them. His latest collection, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, consists of eighteen partially linked essays about memory, place, exile, and identity.

Aciman says he always begins his mental meanderings by writing about place. “Some do so by writing about love, war, suffering, cruelty, power, God, or country. I write about place, or the memory of place. I write about a city called Alexandria, which I’m supposed to have loved and about other cities that remind me of a vanished world to which I allegedly wish to return. I write about exile, remembrance and the passage of time. I write—so it would seem—to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.”

In Alibis he writes about New York, where he lives, Paris, where he always dreams of being, Rome where he lived for three years with his family after leaving Alexandria which he also writes about, as well as Tuscany, which may be the one place where he doesn’t dream of being elsewhere-- Barcelona, Cambridge, a bookstore someplace or the Tuscany that he dreamed of being in while living in Egypt.

“And this is what I’ve always suspected about Tuscany. It is about many beautiful things—about small towns, magnificent vistas, and fabulous cuisine, art, culture, history—but it is ultimately about the love of books. It is a reader’s paradise. People come here because of books. Tuscany may well be for people who love life in the present—simple, elaborate, whimsical, complicated life in the present—but it is also for people who love the present when it bears the shadow of the past, who love the world provided it’s at a slight angle Bookish people.”

How I wish I had written that for it is precisely the way I feel when I am in Tuscany.

Aciman is Jewish which is to say that his parents were Jewish, the reason they had to flee Egypt. But also like myself, he is and isn’t Jewish. Neither of us wants to be anything but Jewish provided we don’t have to practice it, learn its rituals, or accept its religious tenets. At times he also wonders what it would be like to live in a place where everyone is Jewish but at other times knows it would not be easy.

Aciman cites an exchange or imagined exchange he had with a woman he was hoping to see in Paris, an exchange that is a perfect reflection of the manner in which he thinks or at least writes about the way he thinks or imagines he does. “Since you’re going to Paris, you don’t want to go to Paris. But if you were staying in New York, you’d want to be in Paris. But since you’re not staying, but going, just do me a favor. When you’re in Paris, think of yourself in New York longing for Paris, and everything will be fine.”

All the essays in this collection are written in this manner. Oddly I am one who greatly enjoys reading them, their contradictions, paradoxes, ambiguities, questions, uncertainties, backtrackings, recollections, sometimes true, sometimes false, or partially false, that become true in the writing. I think that is the way my mind works sometimes, but not all the times or the way I might like it to work, since it rarely works that way at all.

On Moving

We are moving once again. This will be the 23rd time we have moved to a new residence since graduate school days and I am hoping most fervently that it will be the last. Dream on, Richard.

We move, I move, because it is one of the pleasantries of academic life—a sabbatical here, a visiting professorship there. And then again we move, I move, because of the restlessness that I cannot escape, wandering from town to town, from neighborhood to neighborhood in search of I know not what.

This has to be the craziest move of them all. How else to look upon it? From our current rental overlooking beautiful downtown Portland, we are moving to the very same unit one floor below—same view, same floor plan, same everything, only now contrary to my irrefutable arguments, we will own the place rather than rent it. So much for my powers of persuasion

I search for writers who have written about moving. What did Emerson have to say? What about Montaigne—he had something to say about everything? But no, neither has written even a snippet about the matter as far as I can tell.

But Lawrence did: We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America -- as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we're rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.

A friend who has recently moved writes: I am not ashamed to admit that when I go back to Atherton, I am homesick. I first saw Atherton when I was 10 years old when my parents went to visit the Walkers who had owned the lumber company in Westwood…and still think of it as my "Eden."

I surely don’t feel this way about our current move. Portland has never been my Eden and I have never felt the least bit like Lawrence, never felt I belonged in Portland. Other places have felt more like home, but they are far away and English is not spoken there, both of which have always been problems for my best beloved.

Andre Aciman writes more perceptively than anyone I know about the larger meanings of these journeys, journeys across the seas or just down the block. In A Literary Pilgrim Progresses to the Past he admits, I may write about place and displacement, but what I'm really writing about is dispersion, evasion, ambivalence: not so much a subject as a move in everything I write.

I may write about little parks in New York that remind me of Rome and about tiny squares in Paris that remind me of New York, and about so many spots in the world that will ultimately take me back to Alexandria. But this crisscrossed trajectory is simply my way of showing how scattered and divided I am about everything else in life.

And a little later in the same article he continues, Ambivalence and dispersion run so deep that I don't know whether I like the place I've chosen to call my home, any more than I know whether I like the writer or even the person I am when no one's looking. And yet the very act of writing has become my way of finding a space and of building a home for myself, my way of taking a shapeless, marshy world and firming it up with paper, the way the Venetians firm up eroded land by driving wooden piles into it.

So like Aciman, I write a bit about this move, playing “musical-condos” if you will, because it is one of the ways I have to make note of writers who express the follies of my life.

Andre Aciman

Andre Aciman is a master of longing. He can long for the place where he is currently located. And he can long for the place he just left the moment he arrives in the place he had been longing to go to in the first place. And then the reverse, once he returns to the place he had originally left. Is this a journey familiar to you? At times, it has been to me.

I now reside in the town where I had dreamed of living for years. At the same time, I yearn for the town I left, one where I had lived for most of my adult life. Yet, I only long for certain elements of it, not its dominant feature, well known to anyone who has lived through its very long and cold, and very wet winters.

Aciman is also the master of ambivalence. His mind is a constant journey of shuttling back and forth between one idea and the next. In Pensione Eolo he writes:

"By missing Manhattan, I learn to long for it, to love it, though I am now conscious that I’m losing Manhattan because I’m about to revisit a place I’ve always suspected I loved more than Manhattan but will not really allow myself to think I’ll be able to revisit unless it, too, like Manhattan, becomes a site of nostalgia, something I can lose, might lose, have lost. Place, in this very peculiar context, means something only if it is tied to its own displacement. I posit one point, but then I posit a second, which sends me back to the first, which then sends me back again to the second, and so on."

In a way, Aciman is the Ingmar Bergman of the page. He seems to have a special pass to inner workings of the mind, at least to his mind and the way it swirls around from one pole to another.

He is also a student and admirer of Proust whose influence is unmistakable. That should be evident from the following passages I recorded from his Letter from Illiers-Combray: In Search of Proust:

"…the Proust who perfected the studied unveiling of spontaneous feelings. Proust invented a language, a style, a rhythm, and a vision that gave memory and introspection an aesthetic scope and magnitude no author had conferred on either before."

"It reminded me of the way Proust’s sentences roam and stray through a labyrinth of words and clauses, only to turn around—just when you are about to give up—and show you something you had always suspected but had never put into words."

"Illiers itself was simply a place where the young Proust dreamed of a better life to come. But because the dream never came true, he had learned to love instead the place where the dream was born."

And then there is the ever-present nostalgia that underlies so many of Aciman’s recollections. Longing, Ambivalence, Nostalgia, the three features that characterize so much of his writing, including his tale Pensione Eolo from which I made note of the following passages:

"…I continued to purchase French and Italian magazines so as not to let go of Europe knowing all along, however, that I’d unavoidably lose touch and that despite my promises to hold on to the old, the new invariably had ways of demoting old things."

"In this state of anticipated nostalgia, which is how those who fear homesickness try to immunize themselves against it—by experiencing it in small persistent doses beforehand…"

"…the confused, back-and-forth, up-and-around, congested nature of ambivalence, of love, and of nostalgia."

"…nostalgia is his (Ulysses) home, the way that, in exile, only paradox makes sense. He finds his home in the purely intellectual realization that he has no home. The site of nostalgia is nostalgia itself. The site of nostalgia is writing and speculating and thinking about nostalgia."

"Ultimately, the real site of nostalgia is not the place that was lost or the place that was never quite had in the first place; it is the text that must record that lost."

"I never went to Italy that year. Pensione Eolo remained a whirlpool of fictions and fantasies and of the memory of an imagined winter spent with a defrocked nun, a marine biologist, and a Hungarian musicologist. I remember as though it were yesterday the day I pictured myself running to the ferryboat one evening to get my mail, only to find that none had arrived that day. The woman in New York whose letter I would have craved to read in Italy was in the next room sulking, while I, in her living room, would look outside over to Riverside Park like a prisoner imagining his imminent liberation, envying those lucky enough to be alone in the park that weekday evening. I hadn’t even told her I had applied for a job abroad. I simply wanted to get away, and kept looking for the slightest pretext to tell her that we couldn’t live together, that she should look for someone else, that I couldn’t wait to be back where I thought I’d be among my own."

"That winter, when it was all over, I would walk or ride a bus past her building. Sometimes I’d think how lucky I’d been to have spent a year with her there and how gladly I would give everything now that I had been back with the same woman, staring out those windows whenever she went sulking into the other room, imagining and envying those strolling outside, never once suspecting that one day soon I might be a stroller, too, looking in, envying the man I’d been there once, knowing all along, though, that if I had to do it over again, I’d still end where I was, yearning for those days when I was living with a woman I had never loved and would never love but in whose home I had managed to fall in love with an ex-would-be-nun whose presence was indissolubly fused to an apartment on the Upper West Side that became dearer to me and made me love New York because from these rooms I had looked out windows facing the Hudson and invented a woman who, like me was neither here not there."

Andre Aciman

Andre Aciman is among the most aware writers I know. And by “aware” I mean in touch with layers and layers of his internal life--emotions, fictions, and feelings. He describes this world with extraordinary sensitivity and insight. It is his world and impossible to know if anything comparable belongs to anyone else.

But in reading his work, I find myself realizing how often I have felt the same and how rarely have I been aware of it. He is in touch with himself to a remarkable degree and in his essays he lays a path for his readers to discover the deeper layers of their own world.

Aciman grew up in a Jewish family that lived Egypt and eventually moved to Italy, then France, and finally the United States. He has written about his early days in Egypt in Out of Egypt and has also published a good many book reviews, memoirs, and essays, some of which are collected in False Papers.

In Intimacy, published in the Summer 2008 issue of The American Scholar he writes about visiting with his wife and three sons the neighborhood of his youth in Rome. The visit unleashes a cascade of reflections and feelings that took him by surprise.

The neighborhood as he saw it then, and as his family surely saw it too, was not the neighborhood he remembered. More importantly it was never his neighborhood in the first place. For the neighborhood that he lived in during those three years of his youth was entirely a world of his own creation. He writes:

“In that room on the Via Clelia, I managed to create a world that corresponded to nothing outside. My books, my city, myself. All I had to do then was let the novels I was reading lend their aura to this street and drop an illusory film over its buildings…”

And later:

“It dawned on me much later that evening that our truest, most private moments, like our truest, most private memories are made of just such unreal, flimsy stuff. Fictions. Via Clelia was my street of lies.”

Perhaps you have also experienced a desire to return to the neighborhood of your youth. Maybe it was also an ambivalent one as it was for Aciman. After leaving the town where I was born, I have returned to it on several occasions but never once visited the neighborhood where I lived, nor have I ever wanted to. But after reading Aciman’s account, I am giving second thought to that decision, although I dread the inevitable disruption of all that I recall.

You will get a glimpse of Aciman’s prose and an appreciation of the moods he brings to it from a few of the passages I noted in Intimacy:


…to settle into the experience [visiting the Roman neighborhood of his youth], gather my impressions, and unlock memory’s sluice gates, one by one.

Does writing, as I did later that day, seek out words the better to stir and un-numb us to life—or does writing provide surrogate pleasures the better to numb us to experience?

Could parts of us just die to the past so that returning brings nothing back?

The romance of time had fallen flat. There was no past to dig up here…I might as well never have lived here at all.

But then, coming back from the West, perhaps it was I who was the shadow, not this street, not my books, not who I once was.

So why shouldn’t Via Clelia feel dead now? It had never been alive.

The walk from one bookstore to the other without paying attention to the city itself became my way of being in Rome…

I’d grown to love this Rome, a Rome that seemed more in me than it was out in Rome itself, because, in this very Rome I’d grown to love, there was perhaps more of me in it than there was of Rome…

It would take decades to realize that this strange, shadow Rome of my own invention was everyone else’s as well.

We seldom ever see, or read, or love things as they in themselves really are, nor, for that matter, do we even know our impressions of them as they really are. What matters is knowing what we see when we see other than what lies before us.

Ultimately, I wanted to peer into books, places, and people because wherever I looked I was always looking for myself, or for traces of myself or better yet, for a world out there filled with people and characters who could be made to be like me…

What my favorite authors were asking of me was that I read them intimately—not an invitation to read my own pulse on someone else’s work, but to read an author’s pulse as thought it were my own…

I told my wife and sons I was happy they had come with me. I told them it was good to come back, good to be heading back soon, good they didn’t let me come back alone. But I spoke these words without conviction, and would have thought I hadn’t meant them had I not grown used to the notion that speaking without conviction is how I hope to be honest. What roundabouts, though, for what others feel so easily. Roundabout love, roundabout intimacy, roundabout truth. In this, at least, I had remained the same.