One
1
THE CRADLE
rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is
but a
brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness, Although the
two are
identical twins, man. as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more
calm than
the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an
hour). I
know, however, of a young
chronophobiac
who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at
homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He
saw a
world that was practically unchanged-the same house, the same
people-and then
realized that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his
absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs
window, and
that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious
farewell.
But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby
carriage
standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a
coffin; even
that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events, his very bones
had
disintegrated.
Such fancies
are not foreign to young lives. Or, to put it otherwise, first and last
things
often tend to have an adolescent note-unless, possibly, they are
directed by
some venerable and rigid religion. Nature expects a full-grown man to
accept
the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the
extraordinary
visions in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal
and the
immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not
enjoy it too
much. I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the urge to take my
rebellion outside and picket nature. Over and over again, my mind has
made
colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmers in
the
impersonal darkness on both sides of my life. That this darkness is
caused
merely by the walls of time separating me and my bruised fists from the
free
world of timelessness is a belief I gladly share with the most gaudily
painted
savage. I have journeyed back in thought-with thought hopelessly
tapering off
as I went-to remote regions where I groped for some secret outlet only
to
discover that the prison of time is spherical and without exits. Short
of
suicide, I have tried everything. I have doffed my identity in order to
pass
for a conventional spook and steal into realms that existed before I
was
conceived. I have mentally endured the degrading company of Victorian
lady
novelists and retired colonels who remembered having, in former lives,
been
slave messengers on a Roman road or sages under the willows of Lhasa. I
have
ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues-and let me say at once
that I
reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of
Freud,
with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching
for
Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little
embryos
spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents.
Initially, I
was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison. In
probing my
childhood (which is the next best to probing one's eternity) I see the
awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the
intervals
between them ·gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception
are
formed, affording memory a slippery hold. I had learned numbers and
speech more
or less simultaneously at a very early date, but the inner knowledge
that I was
I and that my parents were my parents seems to have been established
only
later, when it was directly associated with my discovering their age in
relation to mine. Judging by the strong sunlight that, when I think of
that revelation,
immediately invades my memory with lobed sun flecks through overlapping
patterns
of greenery, the occasion may have been my mother's birthday, in late
summer, in
the country, and I had asked questions and had assessed the answers I
received.
All this is as it should be according to the theory of recapitulation;
the
beginning of reflexive consciousness in the brain of our remotest
ancestor must
surely have coincided with the dawning of the sense of time.
Thus, when
the newly disclosed, fresh and trim formula of my own age, four, was
confronted
with the parental formulas, thirty-three, and twenty-seven, something
happened to
me. I was given a tremendously invigorating shock. As if subjected to a
second
baptism, on more divine lines than the Greek Catholic ducking undergone
fifty
months earlier by a howling, half-drowned half-Victor (my mother,
through the half-closed
door, behind which an old custom bade parents retreat, managed to
correct the
bungling archpresbyter, Father Konstantin Vetvenitski), I felt myself
plunged abruptly
into a radiant and mobile medium that was none other than the pure
element of
time. One shared it-just as excited bathers share shining seawater-with
creatures that were not oneself but that were joined to one by time's
common
flow, an environment quite different from the spatial world, which not
only man
but apes and butterflies can perceive. At that instant, I became
acutely aware
that the twenty-seven-year-old being, in soft white and pink, holding
my left
hand, was my mother, and that the thirty-three-year-old being, in hard
white
and gold, holding my right hand, was my father. Between them, as they
evenly
progressed, I strutted, and trotted, and strutted again, from sun fleck
to sun fleck,
along the middle of a path, which I easily identify today with an alley
of
ornamental oaklings in the park of our country estate, Vyra, in the
former
Province of St. Petersburg, Russia. Indeed, from my present ridge of
remote,
isolated, almost uninhabited time, I see my diminutive self as
celebrating, on
that August day 1903, the birth of sentient life. If my
left-hand-holder and my
right-hand-holder had both been present before in my vague infant
world, they
had been so under the mask of a tender incognito; but now my father's
attire,
the resplendent uniform of the Horse Guards, with that smooth golden
swell of cuirass
burning upon his chest and back, carne out like the sun, and for
several years
afterward I remained keenly interested in the age of my parents and
kept myself
informed about it, like a nervous passenger asking the time in order to
check a
new watch.
My father,
let it be noted, had served his term of military training long before I
was
born, so I suppose he had that day put on the trappings of his old
regiment as
a festive joke. To a joke, then, I owe my first gleam of complete
consciousness-which again· has recapitulatory implications, since the
first
creatures on earth to become aware of time were also the first creature
to
smile.