Topical Guide 200
Mark Dorset
Fictional Characters: Robert Meyer
I stretched, yawned, and decided to take a break from my work to read a letter from a high school acquaintance, Robert Meyer, a boy who had passed through Babbington High School almost unnoticed, but who had this year done a daring thing for that time, taken a year’s sabbatical from college to be on his own in Europe. As soon as he reached European soil, Robert began writing to everyone who had ignored him in high school. He wrote long, tedious letters full of strained insights, accounts of unlikely sexual encounters, and snatches of the local language. I received at least one a week.
When the first of his letters arrived, I had no idea who Robert Meyer was, and it wasn’t until I began hearing from friends who had also received letters from him that I was able to retrieve a blurry face from my memory of high school, someone rushing past in the hallway, mumbling a greeting, but averting his face and hurrying on, someone still sitting in the stands after a football game, alone, at one end of the upper row of bleachers, while the rest of us headed for the gate, the parking lot, cars, pizza. I looked him up in my yearbook, but his photograph was no more help to me in recalling Robert just a year after we had been in school together than the photographs of my other classmates would be twenty-five years later. Though I was happy to receive any mail, even letters from Robert, they grew wearying after a while, and so when one arrived I delayed opening it for a little longer than I had delayed opening the last. This one had been in my book bag for several days. I tore open the thin blue envelope, unfolded the letter and read.“Ich bin nun endlich in München und sitze hier in meinem Zimmer bei Frau Brenner in der Schellingstrasse,” the letter began.
Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
This is the first page of the first lesson of the text for Kraft’s freshman-year German course:
The students had to memorize the “basic text” for each lesson. To this day, Kraft can recite the basic text for Lesson One. Believe me. I know. I’ve heard him do it. More than once.
Illusions: Upon Waking
A young woman with dark hair stepped out of the fog and brought her face near mine. I found myself sitting straight in a leather chair, my back pressed firmly along its back, my legs flat along the seat where the dock ought to have been, my lower legs against the edge of the cushion, and from around me I heard a sound that I thought I recognized, a sound that might be laughter, but I saw no people; a sound that might be the lapping of waves, if there were waves inside a building. Certainly I was inside a building, but I was looking at the ceiling, and if the evidence of my eyes was to be believed, the ceiling had been moved around to occupy the plane ordinarily occupied by a wall. Some sort of practical joke? Not likely, I thought. A trick of the mind, the not-quite-fully-awake mind. Transpositions of this sort were, I knew from my several attempts to read À La Recherche du Temps Perdu, not uncommon illusions upon awakening; in the misty margin between sleep and wakefulness Marcel might seem to recognize the architecture and furnishings of his room at home, only to find, as he came slowly to his senses, that the uplifted forefinger of day had rearranged the furniture, the windows, the doorways, and the walls, and transformed his bedroom into a hotel room with a view of the sea.
Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that, towards morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading, in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he gets drowsy in some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair, say, after dinner: then the world will fall topsy-turvy from its orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier and in some far distant country. But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke at midnight, not knowing where I was, I could not be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal’s consciousness; I was more destitute of human qualities than the cave-dweller; but then the memory, not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived, and might now very possibly be, would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse and surmount centuries of civilisation, and out of a half-visualised succession of oil-lamps, followed by shirts with turned-down collars, would put together by degrees the component parts of my ego.
Marcel Proust, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Du Côté du Chez Swann, “Combray” (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff)
At cocktail time: Cocktails with a Curator 2: Rembrandt’s “Polish Rider”:
[more to come on Tuesday, February 22, 2022]
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