Remembering the Future

We had sort of expected that in our exile, we would rent an apartment on the same road that Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had their place. We would breakfast on croissants and the atmosphere would have that timeless, morose feeling of the existentialists. The inevitable clink of the demitasses would measure our time. A slight rain would fall. The Parisians would know why we were there without us having to say a word. We would use an old copy of Being and Nothingness to prop up a table, next to a white wall, with one leg inexplicably shorter than the others. We would wait for our Visas and discuss philosophy in the interim.

We would avoid the moribund discussions of the meaninglessness of waiting. Though we would attend a new adaptation of Beckett’s, Waiting for Godot. “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.” We would agree: he had that right. We would have a discussion about whether, if in the worst of all possible worlds, where we do not get our entry Visas, we could remain in Paris. We would make friends amongst the ex-pats, shun the locals, shop in American style supermarkets, consume large quantities of consumer goods and eat. We would eat as Sartre suggests, “To eat is to appropriate by destruction.” No wine, no bread, no cheese that does not come from a jar. It would be our despair, to live in the world’s gastromonie and eat as if we were in New Jersey. We would destroy the dream and live up to the expectations of rejection. The responsibility of freedom would overwhelm joyous liberation with a crushing despondency, as it always does.

No, we decided. Even if the worst were to occur, we could not stay in Paris. Paris, after all, is a city to leave, not a city to stay in. This would become our time in Paris -- the dark phase of our exile. In the future, we would remember this as our version of The Troubled Sleep. But the future of remembering is indeterminate. Our time in Paris was not going to be like that. It would be like I started off to say, a quiet time, with the meaninglessness of waiting. A void you can neither enter nor leave; a limbo of lost souls who will never see the Creator.

We would walk the streets holding hands, ducking into cafes to avoid the rain. It would always rain there. On our faces, looks of indifference, our shoes getting old and worn. We will abandon our watches. We will abandon our subservience to time. Time, that great killer. We will discuss the nature of time at length, its theoretical shape, theories of time, perceptions of time, and the meaning of time. For a while we will be distracted into the relative measurement of time, then, for a short period the arrow of time. At the Sorbonne we will stop for a while and read in quantum physics to answer a few questions that we will inevitably be led too. It will be of no help.

In a café, one afternoon, the rain just a mist, we will have a lively discussion about what it would be like if the arrow of time were reversed. Stephen Hawking suggested that this is a possibility if the universe ever reaches its maximum expansion and begins its long slow contraction back to the Big Bang. He suggests that time would be reversed in this situation. “We would be able to remember the future.” We will be very excited and we will talk loudly.

The Parisians will shoot us looks of scorn and a fat American at the table across will finally say, “The only problem with that idea is it beats the hell out of the stock market.” Janet will nod at him and begin humming Neil Young’s, Southern Man. “You all won’t have true Freedom in that situation, ‘cause your future will have already have been determined by your universal laws of physics. That’s why I say, it’s an un-American idea and you two should stop talking about it. These continentals don’t know nothing about true Freedom. True Freedom has always come at the price of rebellion. You two should be talking about analytical philosophy not that continental stuff. In your American philosophy, you don’t go getting time all screwed up like that.”

Janet will raise her hand and say, “Let me see if I understand what you are saying. You are saying that if the arrow of time were to be reversed, then, Freedom would just be another word for nothing left to loose. Is that right?” “Why that’s right, little lady,” he will reply, “that’s a real American idea now ain’t it? Boy you are smart little thing aren’t you?” “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. As Simone de Beauvoir said.” Janet would say. “See what I mean, now you have a nice day.”

A nice day it was, despite him. But our conversations about time would soon come to an end. The rain will fall with ever-increasing steadiness. We will hold up in our apartment, sunken in the over- stuffed upholstery. We will make our own coffee. The looks on our faces, those of indifference, as we sip. The silence of the Authorities in our desired country will stultify us into silence. We will discover as Sartre and Simone did, the hard way: that with out an authority to overcome first, without a God to pronounce dead, there will be no Freedom at all. We will discover also that without Freedom, there is no responsibility for it. No decision has to be made. There is always one more thing to loose after you loose Freedom -- responsibility.

It will be a time that is very hard for us to remember. Neither of us will be able to articulate the feeling or recount the events. Janet will say I was angry. I will say she was detached. The coffee cups will go unwashed. Our old shoes will pile in the corner under the table with the short leg. One day an empty wine bottle will get pushed off the table by a volume of Camus’, The Happy Death. This is what I will remember; Janet will say it was The Myth of Sisyphus. We will argue over this for some time, as if there really is a truth that anyone can agree upon. The rain will be incessant.

Later, it will occur to us, not in anyway that either of us will be able to take credit for, but it will happen. Our moods will lighten. Hopefulness will pierce the darkness with one small pinhole of light. The rain will no longer carry the weight of oppression. The death of Freedom will liberate us like Sisyphus deciding to no longer push his great stone. Time will slowly begin to resume. The Parisians will not know why we are there any longer. It will be just a few short days until our Visas arrive. Then it will be time to leave Paris for good.