다시 살아도 또 이 삶을 살고 싶도록 나는 살고 있는가' - 니체 -
헬라어에는 시간을 뜻하는 말로 크로노스(kronos)와 카이로스(kairos)가 있다. 크로노스는 가만히 있어도 흘러가는 자연적인 시간으로 누구에게나 공평하게 주어지는 객관적인 시간을 의미하는 반면에 카이로스는 나에게만 허락된 시간으로 나의 선택에 의해 특별한 의미가 부여된 주관적인 시간을 의미한다. 그런데 기회의 신이라고도 불리는 카이로스의 외모를 보면, 앞머리는 길고 무성한 곱슬머리인데 반해 뒷머리는 민머리이고, 왼손에는 저울을, 오른손에는 날카로운 칼을 들고 있으며, 발뒤꿈치와 등에는 날개가 달려있는 우스꽝스러운 모습이다. 앞머리가 무성한 이유는 사람들이 보았을 때 쉽게 붙잡을 수 있게 하기 위함이고, 뒷머리가 민머리인 이유는 한번 지나가고 나면 다시는 붙잡지 못하게 하기 위함이며, 저울은 기회가 앞에 있을 때 옳고 그름을 분별하기 위함이고, 칼은 옳다고 판단되면 주저 없이 결단하기 위함이며, 발에 날개가 달린 이유는 최대한 빨리 사라지기 위함이라고 한다.
크로노스의 시간은 빈부, 성별, 종교, 인종을 떠나 누구에게나 공평하게 주어지지만 사람들은 각자 다른 카이로스의 시간 속에서 살아간다. 우리는 누구나 동일하게 흘러가는 시간 속에 존재하지만 그 흘러가는 시간을 나만의 특별한 의미로 붙잡을 수 있는 기회는 오로지 각자의 선택에 달려 있다. 그리고 그 기회를 잡기 위해서는 후회하지 않을 용기와 결단이 필요하다.
Remains of the Day
By Parul Sehgal
July 27, 2017
For more than 50 years, the German novelist Christa Wolf kept an unusual diary: She recorded the events of just one day — Sept. 27. The project began as an assignment by a Russian newspaper, but she discovered she couldn’t stop. Until her death in 2011, she faithfully jotted down what she ate on that day, and where she went, what she saw and whom. “I began to await with a certain sense of tension what this day of the year, as I soon called it, would bring me each time,” she wrote. “Noting down the details became a sometimes delightful, sometimes inconvenient duty. It also became an exercise in preventing blindness to reality.” The final volume of the diary, “One Day a Year: 2001-2011” (Seagull Books, $21), edited by her husband, Gerhard Wolf, and translated by Katy Derbyshire, was published this spring.
What do we learn about Wolf? Everything and nothing. Although famous for her autobiographically inflected fiction like “The Quest for Christa T.,” about a young woman’s disillusionment with socialism, she’s not a natural diarist. The book is thronged with detail, but of a careful kind. Wolf doesn’t confide so much as report — on a crunchy gherkin, on abstract political anxieties, on a disconcerting dream. Everything is mostly “wonderful”: the porcinis she finds at the market, the summer weather, steak with Madeira sauce, her great-granddaughter, an art catalog that arrives in the mail. There are a few more piquant moments as she ages and an appealing harshness and humor enter the pages, but she isn’t writing to know herself or to be known. She has another, more complicated project in mind.
As the diary begins, Wolf is reading E. L. Doctorow and is stung by his claim that it is impossible for a writer truly to capture the texture of life. It’s the irritant that produces the pearl. “Is life identical to time, which passes inescapably but mysteriously?” she writes in this book that becomes her rejoinder. “Time passes while I write this sentence; simultaneously, a tiny piece of my life comes about — and passes. Is life thus made up of countless such microscopic pieces of time? Strange, though, that we can never catch it in the act. It escapes the watching eye and the diligently noting hand, and in the end — at the end of a chapter of one’s life, too — has assembled itself behind our backs according to our unspoken needs: more substantial, more significant, more exciting, more meaningful, heavier with stories.”
The unknowability, the elusiveness of the present moment has been remarked on by saints (Augustine: “What then is time? Provided no one ask me, I know”), scientists (Richard Feynman: “Time is what happens when nothing else does”), artists (Proust: “In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life”). You can do almost anything to time, it seems: spend and save it, find and lose it — even kill it. You just can’t see it. According to the neurologist David Eagleman there is no one spot that tracks time in the brain. “It’s a distributed property,” he has said. “It’s meta-sensory; it rides on top of all the others.” It’s this mysterious quarry that Wolf — and so many writers today — stalk, with all kinds of narrative strategies.
For Wolf, time is fugitive (“History often seems to me like a funnel, down which our lives swirl, never to be seen again”), but her book is a sieve, a way to snare what can be caught, those strings of seeming banalities — that gherkin, an odd detail from a dream, how her husband learns to roll up her surgical stockings for her when she falls asleep in front of the television, that she suddenly needs surgical stockings in the first place. In Ben Lerner’s novel “Leaving the Atocha Station,” the narrator struggles to pin down what he calls “the texture of et cetera itself”, and the feel of time passing — “life’s white machine.” In his six-volume autobiographical novel, “My Struggle,” Karl Ove Knausgaard channels something of the durational art experiments of the 1960s in his domestic scenes of meticulously making tea and taking his children to music class. There is a quality of trying to weigh time down with detail, to make us aware of our own attention, to teach us how to perceive slowly, as if for the first time. “Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments,” he writes. “Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know that is happening we are 40, 50, 60. … Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance.”
So many writers think through these questions in autofiction — and more explicitly in the diary mode itself. In “Ongoingness,” her book about her habit of diary-keeping, Sarah Manguso writes, “The essential problem of ongoingness is that one must contemplate time as that very time, that very subject of one’s contemplation, disappears.” Her book is a record of both moments and empty time — what the Greeks split into chronos, time as neutral measure, and kairos, time heightened with meaning. “I wanted to comprehend my own position in time so I could use my evolving self as completely and as usefully as possible,” she writes. “I didn’t want to go lurching around, half-awake, unaware of the work I owed the world, work I didn’t want to live without doing.” Heidi Julavits opens her book “The Folded Clock,” an account of two years in her life, with the question “What is the worth of a day?,” and each entry unspools the same way: “Today I wore a coat I haven’t worn for years”; “Today I was stung by a wasp.” Renee Gladman starts most of the 60 short essays in her recent book “Calamities” with the phrase “I began the day. …”
Why this particular interest in the single day as a unit of time and thought? It seems to share some of the same desires and anxieties reflected in the proliferation of “slow” movements — slow cooking, slow sex, slow parenting, slow cities — the yearning for a more biologically based time. But we’ve always talked back to time, always tried to slow it, stall it, rebuke it while we can. Think of Freder in Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” climbing onto a clock on the factory floor, wrestling with its arms and ending up crucified. Or the artist Tehching Hsieh, who arrived in America as an illegal immigrant in the 1970s. For an entire year, he dressed in a worker’s uniform and punched a clock in his studio every hour on the hour for his Sisyphean “Time Clock Piece” (1980-81). Or the conceptual artist On Kawara, who for 30 years sent nearly 900 telegrams to friends saying simply, “I am still alive.”
“Look, here we are, even now,” Manguso writes. Most art announces this to the world, but diaries — those funny mechanisms of self-surveillance — remind us of it. Surveillance is a charged word where Wolf is concerned: For 30 years the Stasi spied on her — and for a time she served as an informant herself. “Subjectivity remains the most important criterion of the diary,” she writes in “One Day a Year.” “This is a scandal in a time when we are to be drenched in objects and objectified ourselves.” The diary can be a way of learning to watch yourself, she suggests, instead of watching or imagining yourself being watched. It’s can be a way of reaffirming contact with the self — and then, more radically, finding within its enclosure (Julavits’s “folded clock”) a more idiosyncratic, more personal way of marking and possessing time before it has its way with us.
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Parul Sehgal is senior editor of the Book Review.
A version of this article appears in print on July 30, 2017, on Page 27 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: International Literature. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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