Now blows the wind of the Present at the top of the Past — at the top of the passes I have been proud to reach in my life, the Umbrail, the Fluela, the Furka, of my clearest consciousness! The moment changes at the point of perception only because I myself am in a constant state of trivial metamorphosis. To give myself time to time Time I must move my mind in the direction opposite to that in which I am moving, as one does when one is driving past a long row of poplars and wishes to isolate and stop one of them, thus making the green blur reveal and offer, yes, offer, its every leaf. Cretin behind me.
This act of attention is what I called last year the ‘Deliberate Present’ to distinguish it from its more general form termed (by Clay in 1882) the ‘Specious Present.’ The conscious construction of one, and the familiar current of the other give us three or four seconds of what can be felt as nowness. This nowness is the only reality we know; it follows the colored nothingness of the no-longer and precedes the absolute nothingness of the future. Thus, in a quite literal sense, we may say that conscious human life lasts always only one moment, for at any moment of deliberate attention to our own flow of consciousness we cannot know if that moment will be followed by another. As I shall later explain, I do not believe that ‘anticipation’ (‘looking forward to a promotion or fearing a social blunder’ as one unfortunate thinker puts it) plays any significant part in the formation of the specious present, nor do I believe that the future is transformed into a third panel of Time, even if we do anticipate something or other — a turn of the familiar road or the picturesque rise of two steep hills, one with a castle, the other with a church, for the more lucid the forevision the less prophetic it is apt to be. Had that rascal behind me decided to risk it just now he would have collided head-on with the truck that came from beyond the bend, and I and the view might have been eclipsed in the multiple smash.
Our modest Present is, then, the time span that one is directly and actually aware of, with the lingering freshness of the Past still perceived as part of the nowness. In regard to everyday life and the habitual comfort of the body (reasonably healthy, reasonably strong, breathing the green breeze, relishing the aftertaste of the most exquisite food in the world — a boiled egg), it does not matter that we can never enjoy the true Present, which is an instant of zero duration, represented by a rich smudge, as the dimensionless point of geometry is by a sizable dot in printer’s ink on palpable paper. The normal motorist, according to psychologists and policemen, can perceive, visually, a unit of time as short in extension as one tenth of a second (I had a patient, a former gambler, who could identify a playing card in a five-times-faster flash!). It would be interesting to measure the instant we need to become aware of disappointed or fulfilled expectations. Smells can be very sudden, and in most people the ear and sense of touch work quicker than the eye. Those two hitch-hikers really smelled — the male one revoltingly.
Since the Present is but an imaginary point without an awareness of the immediate past, it is necessary to define that awareness. Not for the first time will Space intrude if I say that what we are aware of as ‘Present’ is the constant building up of the Past, its smoothly and relentlessly rising level. How meager! How magic!
Here they are, the two rocky ruin-crowned hills that I have retained for seventeen years in my mind with decalcomaniac romantic vividness — though not quite exactly, I confess; memory likes the otsebyatina (‘what one contributes oneself’); but the slight discrepancy is now corrected and the act of artistic correction enhances the pang of the Present. The sharpest feeling of nowness, in visual terms, is the deliberate possession of a segment of Space collected by the eye. This is Time’s only contact with Space, but it has a far-reaching reverberation. To be eternal the Present must depend on the conscious spanning of an infinite expansure. Then, and only then, is the Present equatable with Timeless Space. I have been wounded in my duel with the Imposter.
And now I drive into Mont Roux, under garlands of heart-rending welcome. Today is Monday, July 14, 1922, five-thirteen p.m. by my wrist watch, eleven fifty-two by my car’s built-in clock, four-ten by all the timepieces in town. The author is in a confused state of exhilaration, exhaustion, expectancy and panic. He has been climbing with two Austrian guides and a temporarily adopted daughter in the incomparable Balkan mountains. He spent most of May in Dalmatia, and June in the Dolomites, and got letters in both places from Ada telling him of her husband’s death (April 23, in Arizona). He started working his way west in a dark-blue Argus, dearer to him than sapphires and morphos because she happened to have ordered an exactly similar one to be ready for her in Geneva. He collected three additional villas, two on the Adriatic and one at Ardez in the Northern Grisons. Late on Sunday, July 13, in nearby Alvena, the concierge of the Alraun Palace handed him a cable that had waited for him since Friday
ARRIVING MONT ROUX TROIS CYGNES MONDAY DINNERTIME I WANT YOU TO WIRE ME FRANKLY IF THE DATE AND THE WHOLE TRALALA ARE INCONVENIENT.
He transmitted by the new ‘instantogram,’ flashed to the Geneva airport, a message ending in the last word of her 1905 cable; and despite the threats of a torrential night set out by car for the Vaud. Traveling too fast and too wildly, he somehow missed the Oberhalbstein road at the Sylvaplana fork (150 kilometers south of Alvena); wriggled back north, via Chiavenna and Splügen, to reach in apocalyptic circumstances Highway 19 (an unnecessary trip of 100 kilometers); veered by mistake east to Chur; performed an unprintable U-turn, and covered in a couple of hours the 175-kilometer stretch westward to Brig. The pale flush of dawn in his rear-vision mirror had long since turned to passionately bright daylight when he looped south, by the new Pfynwald road, to Sorcière, where seventeen years ago he had bought a house (now Villa Jolana). The three or four servants he had left there to look after it had taken advantage of his lengthy absence to fade away; so, with the enthusiastic help of two hitch-hikers stranded in the vicinity — a disgusting youth from Hilden and his long-haired, slatternly, languorous Hilda — he had to break into his own house. His accomplices were mistaken if they expected to find loot and liquor there. After throwing them out he vainly courted sleep on a sheetless bed and finally betook himself to the bird-mad garden, where his two friends were copulating in the empty swimming pool and had to be shooed off again. It was now around noon. He worked for a couple of hours on his Texture of Time, begun in the Dolomites at the Lammermoor (not the best of his recent hotels). The utilitarian impulse behind the task was to keep him from brooding on the ordeal of happiness awaiting him 150 kilometers west; it did not prevent a healthy longing for a hot breakfast from making him interrupt his scribbling to seek out a roadside inn on his way to Mont Roux.
The Three Swans where he had reserved rooms 508-509-510 had undergone certain changes since 1905. A portly, plum-nosed Lucien did not recognize him at once — and then remarked that Monsieur was certainly not ‘deperishing’ — although actually Van had almost reverted to his weight of seventeen years earlier, having shed several kilos in the Balkans rock-climbing with crazy little Acrazia (now dumped in a fashionable boarding school near Florence). No, Madame Vinn Landère had not called. Yes, the hall had been renovated. Swiss-German Louis Wicht now managed the hotel instead of his late father-in-law Luigi Fantini. In the lounge, as seen through its entrance, the huge memorable oil — three ample-haunched Ledas swapping lacustrine impressions — had been replaced by a neoprimitive masterpiece showing three yellow eggs and a pair of plumber’s gloves on what looked like wet bathroom tiling. As Van stepped into the ‘elevator’ followed by a black-coated receptionist, it acknowledged his footfall with a hollow clank and then, upon moving, feverishly began transmitting a fragmentary report on some competition — possibly a tricycle race. Van could not help feeling sorry that this blind functional box (even smaller than the slop-pail lift
