I try sometimes to suppose the idea that twenty-first-century man will have of our epoch. It would seem that we have this advantage over our ancestors, that our technology has found certain means for the more or less permanent conservation of time. People like to say to themselves that the most impersonal writer, making the best possible portrait of his century, cannot tell us as much as the little gray gleam of an old-fashioned film. Wrong. Contemporary cinematographic methods which seem to our eyes to give a perfectly exact image of life will probably be so different from the methods used by our great-great-nephews that the impression that they will give of the movement of our era (the wan quivering of a street corner swarming with vehicles forever vanished) will be rendered false by the very style of the photography, by that antiquated and awkward air that engravings showing the events of a past century have for our eyes. In other words, our descendants will not have a direct sensation of reality. Man will never be the master of time—but how curious it would be to be able at least to stop it to examine at leisure the nuance that escapes us, the ray that’s out of place, that shade whose ungraspable velvet isn’t made for our touch.
A sunny day, perhaps too hot; there will be rain. I look out my window, I lean out, I try to get out of my era and to envisage this street here in the retrospective fashion that will be so natural to our descendants and that I am so jealous of. A blue car has stopped near the pavement. The sky, a bluish wash, is reflected in the lacquered roof, and the broken chessboard of the paving stones climbs and tilts in the varnished depths of the door. This car, these paving stones, the clothes of the people passing by, the way in which the fruits and vegetables of the corner shop are arranged, these two big chestnut draft horses attached to a moving van, the hum of a plane above the roofs—all these things put together give me the sensation of a certain present reality, of a combination that will still be possible tomorrow, but which will not be in twenty or so years. I try to imagine all this as a past resuscitated, I force my eyes to find the passersby dressed in a bygone style, I almost succeed in seeing in this car that poor and drab something or other that strikes us when we see a carriage in a historical museum. Experiments in vain, provoking a slight vertigo, a strange displacement, as when, lying on the sand, your head back, you look upside down at how people walk (the knee bends, the foot seems to push the ground back), you have for a moment a visual sensation of gravity. But these moments are short; the mind is immediately caught up again by the habits of daily life. And then one tells oneself that, after all, among the things that seem to us to group together in a unique order, forming present reality, there are some that will exist for a long time—the jerky twittering of sparrows, the green of the lilacs falling over the railings, the white breastpiece and the gray rump of a cloud gliding proud through the damp blue of a June sky.
Our eagerness to surprise and possess time is conveyed by the stress we put on the word “our” when we speak of “our era.” An ephemeral possession, for time flows between our fingers, today’s generalization is no longer true tomorrow.
It’s the snows of yesteryear and not the marbles that I want to see and touch. For we really possess only the pale image, the inert body of a past forever gone. We study it so. We dress it up in so many systems, and give it such handy labels, that we almost come to the point of believing that men of the thirteenth century knew as well as we do that they lived in the Middle Ages. What a surprise it would be to know the label the future historian will attach to the twentieth century.
It’s the man of tomorrow who will examine what will be left of the remains of the man of today, but it’s indeed this latter who sees the movement, the colors, and the lineaments of his living body, of which the other sees only the skeleton. The historian of his own time, the historian of times past are none the wiser. All that we can say of our century is always more art than science. That philosopher who, two or three years ago, wrote a big book taking the short skirt as the symbol of our era, must today pull a funny long face if he happens to read fashion magazines or simply to look out the window. There are on the other hand poets who seem to think that the skyscraper is the best mark of the present—whereas architects (and it’s always the specialist’s opinion that counts) tell us that the trend of the time is to construct smaller and lower houses. That’s why I always have a terrible fear of the symbols or symptoms of what people are pleased to call “our era.” All the more so since each country seems to have its favorite fetishes.
The blue car has gone, the sky is gray, it’s going to rain. A brawl in a street in Algeciras, a submarine gliding toward the Pole, a man in shirtsleeves killing his wife with ax blows in a peaceful little provincial town, a secret political meeting in England, an explorer lost in the mountains of Tibet, drops of rain, one, two, three, and then all together tapping on my window.
No, there’s nothing of the systematizer in me, and my mind isn’t delicately enough constituted to grasp the ideas and currents of my century. It doesn’t seem to me, this century, worse than another; it has its share of courage, goodness, genius, it plays football marvelously well, it thinks and works a lot, in a word, it is….
But there I am, surprising myself fixing an inscription of doubtful validity, a street name the next government will change, a colored hotel sticker fading on an old suitcase….
* Vladimir Sirine, “Les Écrivains et l’époque,” Le Mois 6 (June 1–July 1, 1931), 137–39.