For years—primarily, but not exclusively, my childhood years—I supposed that there was a clear demarcation between fantasy and reality, something like the edge of the sidewalk at the margin of the park we called Paradise. Specifically, with regard to the Glynns, I supposed that the line fell between the role-playing that the girls and I indulged in after each movie—which I took for our fantasy life—and the voluptuous hours I spent in the twins’ bed in the cozy keep in the Glynns’ stone house—which I supposed to be a real life that we were making for ourselves. I don’t mean to be hard on my childhood self—in general I’m very generous to the little guy, and as I said above I’m grateful to him for his bit of understanding about the playing of parts—but to be honest I would have to say that he was making a foolishly simpleminded assessment of the whole situation.
When we turned off the sidewalk to cut through the park we called Paradise, I set aside whatever part I might have been playing while we walked along that stretch of Main Street from the theater westward—or am I wrong to say that I set it aside? That implies my making a deliberate decision to leave the character. Better, perhaps, to say that the character was left behind, or even that the character left me—but then that suggests that the volition lay with the character, not with me, and that can’t be, can it? Certainly not. Say, then, that my character and I parted, and who can say which of us chose to end the relationship? Anyway, a change came over me then, marked by a shudder like the shudder that passes through one when the wind shifts to a colder quarter and forces one to pay attention to it, like a thug who appears suddenly from the shadows of an alleyway and clamps a strong arresting hand on one’s shoulder.
When I stepped off the sidewalk and onto the path that led through the park, I would (with an involuntary shudder) begin to slip out of character and back into myself. Back into myself? Or simply into myself? Maybe it would be more accurate to say that I was slipping out of one character and into another, for it is certainly true that the Peter Leroy I had become in the company of the Glynns, at the hands of the Glynns, the Peter Leroy I was becoming under the tutelage of the Glynns, the Peter Leroy who so enjoyed the attentions of the Glynns, was not the Peter Leroy I had been, and yet he was not yet so fully in control of his self, my self, that I could say that he was myself, so, perhaps, he was another character, one whose part I might find myself playing forever. At any rate, as soon as I stepped from the sidewalk onto the path, a change came over me.
The change that came over me put me in mind of the board games that I played with my friends, on rainy days. I was at that time an avid player of games, especially board games. No, that’s not quite accurate. I should say that I was still an interested player of board games. I had once been avid. At the time I’m considering I was still interested, but no longer avid. Now I am no longer interested at all. At the time of the Glynns, though, I was still interested, and I would relish a rainy Saturday, when I could get together with my friends and play one of the games we enjoyed. From those games and the playing of them I can construct a comparison for the change that came over me. Stepping from the regularity of the concrete squares of the sidewalk—hard, level, rectangular, like the squares on a board game—onto the irregular, dusty, ambling, curvilinear pathway through the lush park was like stepping from one game into another, from a game that was relatively easy to understand, with a set of rules simple enough to be printed in their entirety in large type on the inside of the lid of the box, to a game so complicated that I might never understand it or even read to the end of its rules.
What was the nature of the “stepping”? Would I call it a leap? A blunder? Instead of stepping, could I more accurately say “leaping, blundering, wandering, deviating”? Yes, yes. All of them and more. Cram them all into “stepping.” As I stepped from the concrete sidewalk onto the dusty path through Paradise, my thoughts turned away from the film and toward the evening ahead of me, to the time, just a few minutes away, when I would climb onto the shed, clamber up the wall, climb up the ladder, slip through the window, and spend the night in Margot and Martha’s bed, as another character in another game.
What was there about the passage that made me decide that I probably ought to delete it? It was far too long, for one thing; for another, it seemed too analytical, too much the sort of thing I say sometimes in conversation when I’m trying to convince someone that I’m aware of what I’m doing when I write my personal history; it was too much the product of my adult self and a bit too condescending toward my childhood self; and it contained a section in which I address you directly, Reader, and Albertine doesn’t like it when I address you directly, even though Longinus, in his enumeration of the sources of the sublime, pointed out that all passages that use the device, “by their direct personal form of address, bring the hearer right into the middle of the action being described,” and adds that, because the writer seems to be “addressing, not the whole audience, but a single member of it,” such passages affect that one hearer, or reader, “more profoundly.”
Instead, I decided to say simply this: those nights left me with a passionate love of the cinema.
[to be continued]
In Topical Guide 849, Mark Dorset considers Rhetorical Devices: Direct Address or Personal Address from this episode.
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