In 1984 I thought I’d be living in Europe. After more than fifteen years in the United States, the time had finally come for me to return to a continent I had long considered my home. I remember now the joy on first receiving the job offer by mail, a joy I held on to at first like a lover to a new love, secretly, repeating the news to no one, not even to myself, partly for fear of ruining the spell, and partly to renew that access of joy each time I managed to forget I had already opened that much-awaited letter, which began, not, as I forced myself to believe, with the familiar “We regret …” but with the insidious, baffling, treacherous “We are pleased to inform you …” These repeated bursts of joy made everything about that early-winter evening on the Upper West Side seem luminous, as though hazy premonitions of Europe had suddenly been released by the letter and were now infusing everything, from the late-autumnal cast of light on Broadway, to the sound of traffic, of people, down to the peculiar pre-dinner rush around Butler Library, where I liked to work before heading off to my favorite café on Amsterdam Avenue.
By virtue of pretending to suppress the joy, I had almost managed to unearth another emotion, one that doesn’t have a name and which may be not even an emotion but the shadow of an emotion, and which hovered about like the other face of joy, its tactful underside, its surrogate, silent partner, something like an undefined languor which finally surfaced when I eventually managed to remind myself that, once in Europe, I’d be missing Christmas in New York that year.
I was longing for something I already had, all the while sensing that this manufactured nostalgia for New York was but another way of re-releasing a joy that had, by virtue of these antics and torsions, suddenly turned coy and reluctant on me.
For months I’d toyed with the thought of returning to Italy. I had pictured myself heading for an island which, by early fall, would already be cleared of tourists, though warm enough for a quick swim in the afternoon or an al fresco late dinner in what could still pass for a nightlife among the natives and hardened expats. A local café/trattoria, the return of the fishermen by sunset, the early-evening fog, the unavoidable emptying of the town square once it grows cold each year, those bleak hours spent correcting English- and French-language high-school homework by a weak light or, as I feared, under the powerful neon glare with which islanders sometimes hope to brighten their lives. Ours was to be a tiny, respectable hotel, Pensione Eolo, named after the god of the winds. From the windows you’d catch a glimpse of the tiny marina where the ferry stops twice each day. Pensione Eolo remains half-shut during the fall and winter months. On Sundays the locals would use the main dining room for family luncheons and wedding parties. Otherwise, all four of us would dine in a converted TV room with a large, communal table: a marine biologist, a music teacher from Hungary, and a young ex-nun from Trentino
who teaches Latin and whom everyone calls Suor Angelica because she still intends to renew her vows. She and I would have adjacent rooms, but there’d be a partition in the balcony. Sometimes, while grading homework, a whiff of tobacco would waft through my open windows from hers. On Saturday evenings, she’d sit on her balcony and smoke, watching the crowd of young folks and families thin out as everyone headed for the only movie theater in this part of town. She says she doesn’t like new movies. Sometimes I see her sitting by herself behind the glass window at Caffè Gianciotto, spooning a large tortoni. One day I’ll have to ask her why she never gets lonely.
The mail here is unspeakably slow, and my lifeline to New York dries up every so many weeks. There is no local library. I must subscribe to The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and New York magazine. My mind turns back to the late sixties, when, as a student newly arrived in the United States, 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. I had already seen it happen once before, when, almost against my will, as an adolescent new to Italy, I had gradually begun to let go of Alexandria in favor of Rome.
Now, however, I began to fear that once in Europe I’d want to know exactly what was playing at the Met, at the Thalia, the Film Forum, the 92nd Street Y, or what new building had gone up on the Upper West Side, which restaurants had opened, which bookstores closed. I wanted to be there and witness whatever changes were bound to happen, and not just hear of them through friends, or have them sprung on me when I’d eventually return. I wanted the city to go into deep hibernation, not breathe, not change, the way those who are about to die would like everyone alive to doze away with them in a collective slumber until the Day of Judgment,
or the way spurned lovers want the world to stop loving and the places they remember with love in their hearts to remain intact, as they themselves promise to alter nothing in their lives, not the buses they used to ride or the clothes they used to wear, until the day their beloved is finally restored to them.
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—I found myself missing The New York Times and, of all things, the one thing I never used to read regularly, the “Metropolitan Diary,” where average New Yorkers report on the odd, jittery, unhinged character of life in the Big Apple. Would I really be able to withstand stumbling on this or that overheard conversation at such-and-such a familiar place and not ache to rush down a few blocks and see for myself?
Before I knew what I was doing, I had begun to jot down my own “Metropolitan Diary,” little entries that tried to capture life and love on the Upper West Side. These were my Zettelschriften, snatches and snapshots of what was to be my own portable New York.
My notebooks were littered with these Manhattan marginalia: moments of being, spots of time, epiphanies: places in New York which, by virtue of my impending trip, were now retroprospectively blended into my little island off the western coast of Italy.
Thus, inspired by Joyce’s brief “Giacomo Joyce,” one day I wrote:
Suor Angelica: Thought of her again tonight as I stepped out of the 96th Street subway station. It was snowing when I came out. Walked an additional few blocks on my way home simply to think of her, toyed with my picture of Pensione Eolo: small, modest, out-of-season pensione, corner room mine, next to Suor Angelica’s, overlooking the
marina. January: cardigan weather. Both of us teachers at the nuns’ school. We go by bike each day. Mother Superior frowning at us—you are growing too familiar with each other. She’s right of course. Look the young ex-nun in the eye, which gets her all perturbed, till Angelica finally drops me a note on my way to class one day, furtive must-see-you-immediately, in confidenza, she says. She doesn’t mind I’m late when I knock. What courage, though, when she says she may still wish to renew her vows. Forgot people could shake like that. How different, how infinitely more passionate than P., who’s busy leafing through stacks of balance sheets in the bedroom, the TV turned on loud, knowing it disturbs me, waiting for me to apologize about something or other, which I still won’t do, as I sit and invent this woman in Italy whose one flustered glance, as she debates the matter of her vows, is worth a hundred nights in Manhattan.
What I was doing was throwing myself out there, into the future, only to turn around and seize the here and now. Perhaps what I wanted all along was New York. Or perhaps what I wanted was to think that I liked New York, or that I could only think so provided I spun the world enough times not to have to know whether I belonged anywhere.
Expatriation, like love, is not only a condition that devastates and reconfigures the self; it is, like love, a trope, a figure with which we try to explain, to narrate profound psychological disruptions in terms of very measurable entities: a person, a place, an event, a moment, etc.
Nostalgia is one such metaphor.
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. Nothing is stable; every signal emitted turns on me and comes back with the same questioning glance with which it was emitted. Everything becomes a mirror image of itself and of something else. I am, insofar as I can speak of an I, a tiny thinking image caught in a hall of mirrors, thinking, among other things, about halls of mirrors. I am, for all I know, a hall of mirrors.
The problem, clearly enough, is not with place but with me, insofar as place and identity are meshed here in such a way that I may say that I am always, always caught between two points, one of which is always a metaphor of the other. But that’s not quite correct. I am not caught between two points. I am two points caught in the same spot. Correction: I am two points caught in different spots.
This may explain why I am always fond of using the image, the figure, of two foci in an ellipse, or of the two banks of a river, or of the many strands in a cat’s cradle that always manage to reproduce generations of patterns with baffling regularity. The figure in all this is always the same: me tussling between two shadow centers.
I have tried to give a flavor of this figure in many ways here: by showing that once I’m in Italy, I’d really be in New York; that when I’m in New York, I’m already in Italy. In fact, this figure was already
present when I described how my superstitious attempts to come to terms with the job offer abroad had almost made me reluctant to accept it, and how, by virtue of countenancing this rejection, I was in fact propitiating my acceptance, even though these propitiatory motions had a way of diluting my desire to leave New York by reintroducing the desire to return, and, in so doing, diluting the joy of leaving till it became a loathing to leave.
The French moralists would have called these antics not just a renversement continuel of one thing for another but, more precisely, a traffic, a commerce, an economy.
Commerce and economy give a transactional character to the psyche; traffic, on the other hand, is much more accurate, because it captures the confused, back-and-forth, up-and-around, congested nature of ambivalence, of love, and of nostalgia. Traffic captures the bizarre nature of the psyche, where the dominant motion is one not so much of ambivalence as of perpetual oscillation. The true site of nostalgia is therefore not a land, or two lands, but the loop and interminable traffic between these two lands. It is the traffic between places, and not the places themselves, that eventually becomes the home, the spiritual home, the capital. Displacement, as an abstract concept, becomes the tangible home. Let me in fact borrow an adjective from Heraclitus to give this traffic of multiple turns and returns a name by calling it palintropic. To quote Diels’s Fragment 51: “They do not comprehend how a thing agrees at variance with itself; it is an attunement turning back on itself, like that of the bow and the lyre.”
“Palintropic” means that which “turns again—which keeps turning,” which loops back or “turns back on itself” or is “backstretched”—a going back to oneself, a flipping back to oneself, a sort of systemic renversement reminiscent of the back-sprung
reflex Homeric bow, which was strung in such a way as to counteract the normal curvature of the bow, reversing the curve to gain more power.
This, if I might suggest, is the seat of nostalgia, perhaps not its origin but certainly its end point. This is my home, my emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual home.
My home is a counterhome, and my instincts are counterinstincts. Yet this is my home, my emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual home. Exile, nostalgia, a broken heart, and other profound reversals mean nothing unless they induce a corresponding set of intellectual, psychological, and aesthetic reversals as well. I project these reversals on everything, because it is in finding reversals that I am able to find myself. I consolidate my palintropic relationship with the world by redefining the world as a palintropic construct. I cannot “access” the world and cannot find my bearings in it, I cannot behave in the world nor can I narrate the world unless I’ve unearthed its palintropic moment. A palintropic reading of the world assumes that one is not quite like others and that to understand others, to be with others, to love others and be loved by them, one must think other thoughts than those that come naturally to one. To be with others I must be the opposite of who I am; to understand others, I must read the opposite of what I see, say the opposite of what I mean, think the opposite of what I feel, ask for what I do not want. I might as well be someone else.
And I find this moment, this figure everywhere. I find it, for example, in the life of Emperor Julian the Apostate, who converted from paganism to Christianity, then back to paganism; or in the life of another apostate, Uriel da Costa, Spinoza’s near-contemporary, born into a converso family in Portugal, who later converted to Judaism in Amsterdam, then back to Catholicism, and back to Judaism again, ultimately committing suicide; in the life of the seer
Tiresias, who was born a man, became a woman, and became a man again; I find it in my ancestors, who had left Spain to go to Italy, from Italy to Turkey, then back to Italy, some ultimately going to Israel, only to leave the Promised Land to seek out Italy once more. They were at first Jewish, then conversos, then Jews again, some turning to the Christian faith, as my family did, for political reasons, only to turn back to a form of diluted Judaism that longed for a lost Christian past. I find it in the history of my own city, Alexandria, which after being an international commercial center in antiquity was conquered by the Arabs, to become an international city fifteen hundred years later under Western rule, only to return to the Arabs. The history of the Middle East from Troy to Jerusalem is, needless to say, filled with similar instances. I am thrilled when I see street performers who stand still in the middle of sidewalk traffic, imitating a stationary human statue, which itself imitates the human body.
I find it in Stendhal, whose characters, whose voice, and whose prose earn the right to grow sentimental provided they have repressed their initial effusion with gestures of irony. Intuition is always counterintuitive.
I find it in the story I invented about Ulysses, who, suspecting that once he’s returned to Ithaca he may miss his days as an immortal in Calypso’s arms, determines never to leave Calypso and chooses immortality instead. Ulysses, who realizes in fact that nostalgia is not some sort of restless energy that propels him homeward, but that nostalgia is his 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.
At the end of Du côté de chez Swann and at the beginning of A
l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, the adolescent Marcel meets Gilberte Swann in a garden on the Champs-Elysées and is totally taken with her. It should be remembered that this comes just after the Prousts have decided to vacation in Italy one Easter but have since had to change plans: the thrill of going to Italy has so excited the frail Marcel that a family physician forbids the boy to travel to Italy at all. Hence the Champs-Elysées garden, and hence also the eventual displacement of Marcel’s dreams of Venice and Florence by the more ordinary trips each year to Combray.
Combray was always an alibi, an elsewhere, a second-best behind which hovered Marcel’s incessant yet ever-thwarted dreams of Italy. That Marcel should have met the love of his life in Combray, and not Venice, and that he should have had his first parasexual encounter on the Champs-Elysées and not in Italy, and that his dreams and eventual visit to Venice should have been punctuated with powerful and uncanny reminders of Combray, and finally that he should realize at the end of Albertine disparue that what life had to offer him was exactly what he had always wanted if only he had known how to ask for it and seize it when it was offered to him in the least likely of places, Combray, all these ironies and counterintuitive revelations underwrite the fundamentally palintropic texture of Proust’s novel. Life’s painful ironies and coincidences in Proust have ways of becoming “beautiful” and meaningful once they are transferred onto paper, Proust’s true home. The site of nostalgia is nostalgia itself. Paper displaces place, the way writing displaces living.
In A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, Marcel is seen passing by the seemingly inaccessible Swann residence and imagines what it must feel like to be an habitué there. As far as he can tell, everything about the forbidding Swann household seems to bar him access. But one day Marcel is. finally invited. He is invited several
times. So that now he can look out the window and, as though to complete the cycle, try to remember what it must have felt like to have been an outsider once. This move out in the opposite direction not only holds the illusory promise of making him whole but is his way of savoring and resavoring his success. What he finds, however, is that one of the rewards of that success is no longer to be able to remember having longed for it. By another quirk of irony, however, failure to feel whole for the tortured Proustian sensibility is, in fact, a mark of being whole. The pain of realizing that one is fundamentally at odds with the world is ultimately tempered, if not reversed, by the mental agility with which this piece of information is arrived at and ultimately logged down.
Behind all this, of course, hovers the ultimate reversal in the vague inklings that, with Gilberte’s growing indifference, Marcel will soon be on the outside looking in again.
Proustian love always follows an air-with-three-voices pattern. From extremes of loneliness to intimacy and back to loneliness. From indifference to intense jealousy, underscored, as always, by the predictable return of indifference. It’s not that indifference, like loneliness, suddenly reappears; it’s that it has never really gone away. Nor is it that it competes with its opposite, vying with desire for center stage. Irony—Proustian, Stendhalian, Svevian, Ovidian, Austenian—is not characterized so much by the subversion of one voice by another as by an ongoing perpetual traffic between them. It is frequently called a dialectic. It is not. A dialectic is progressive, digressive. Palintropic traffic is static. It’s not that you cannot come back home; it’s that you’ve never really left anything to have to come back to.
The critic Edwin Muir, who was not insensitive to this figure, picked it up in a scene in Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey
and, quite appropriately, called it Proustian. In that scene, a man holds a woman’s hand and, anticipating her reaction to his “slight compression of her palm,” reads in her imagined reaction a certain reluctance, thereby opting not to press her hand at all.
You anticipate the reaction to your own gesture and react to the other’s reaction before initiating your own The palintropic traffic, needless to say, is potentially infinite. There are authors who devote their whole attention to that traffic, and hardly any to plot. There are authors who write that way: by the time they’re about to write something, they’ve already thought of its correction. The first thing they write, the original version, is the correction. They are, to use Nietzsche’s words, always “trying to cover up their feet.” As a result, the text is always nostalgic for those stillborn versions of itself that were crossed out before being written down. In fact, palintropic movement has no origin. You cannot leave, but you already long for the place from which you intend to leave. Nostalgia is rooted in the text itself. That Proust, for example, should allude to his text as a translation is no accident; A la recherche is a transposition of an entire lifetime onto paper. The text is nostalgic for the life it is to be a transcription of. But it is just as much a transcription of that life’s own desire to work itself into a book. To put it in very simple terms: the desire to write A la recherche is what the narrator’s life was all about. The real nostalgia, therefore, is not for Combray, or for an evasive Venice behind Combray, or for a lost childhood, but for the book that was to record the passage from Combray to Venice and from Venice to Combray all over again. The real nostalgia is not for a place but for the record of that nostalgia. The real nostalgia has no point of origin; it is dispersed in the palintropic traffic between several points.
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 loss. In fact, the act of recording the loss is the ultimate homecoming, inasmuch as the act of recording one’s inability to find one’s home on going back to it becomes a homecoming as well. Reading about this paradox is a homecoming. Musing and trying to sort out this paradox is a homecoming. In Proust, even showing how everything is always in the wrong place whenever we go looking for it in the right place is ultimately a way of finding the right thing for the wrong reasons in the right place at the wrong time—which, all told, is very much a homecoming as well.
Let me take this a step further: the true site of nostalgia is not the original place (since there really isn’t one), nor is it just the text that will eventually record the absence of such an origin, or ponder the implied paradox of this. Nor is it the come-and-go traffic between one place and another, or between the text and its multiple versions. The true site of nostalgia is, of course, all of the above—coupled, however, with the realization that to be successful every literary return and every literary reminiscence, like every Proustian insight, must be incomplete and always eager to consider its own failure as such.
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 letters 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.
What I didn’t know was that the woman sulking in the other room was not only already in love with another man but had herself made plans for an extended summer vacation with him in, of all places, Italy.
How better to prevent her from leaving than by not leaving myself? I decided to stay. She, however, left.
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 I now had to be 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 up 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 of windows facing the Hudson and invented a woman who, like me, was neither here nor there.