I've been fantasizing about this time machine that would enable me to slash a direct path through the universe to my favorite writers, right to the moment before they die. I want to save them. I'd be such a hero, they'd name the English department wing of York College after me: the AZ School of Literary Suicide Prevention. The pamphlet has a picture of Hemingway on it, sitting at his desk, with me sitting on it facing him, embracing him lightly. He's shaking his head with delight. In the background, my assistant in a white lab coat is gently putting the revolver back in the case and explaining everything he needs to do to cross over the time portal.
Or, the moment before Virginia Woolf dips her foot into the river, I could be there. I will beg and plead. Come with me, I'll say. To 2011. To my house in New Jersey. I will make you coffee. You can take the train into East Village. You'll love it. I can get you some Cymbalta or Paxil and a laptop and I think it'll be okay. Don't go.
All this maybe because I'm reading Mrs. Dalloway this week. Like Clarissa, I can float through the day, thinking about the past, the characters over the years I've met, the friends who've come and gone. All the mistakes and misunderstandings, the things that went unsaid. The part when she sits on her sofa with her visiting ex-suitor Peter... watching him play with his knife and getting all flustered and annoyed. It's all charged up with the unsaid. How he's thinking she's going to judge him for getting a divorce and loving a married woman (some younger girl he just met) and how he feels he needs to prove something to her, that someone desires him, and that Mrs. Dalloway needs to be reminded after all these years that she should feel regretful that she didn't marry him. And he's thinking all this, and then he cries all of a sudden (I thought the Brits were repressed), and they kiss on the couch. But I don't know if this is a passionate kiss or just an ambiguous polite kiss between friends. I'm too embarrassed to Sparknote it.
What I'm saying is, who wouldn't want a do-over? To go back and say, I should have told you....
I should have told you....
And of course, while we're at it, bending laws of time and space, why not save Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf?
You know this, though. If I brought over Ernest Hemingway through a time portal to my house, he would pillage for my three buck Chuck and eventually seal his fate with what he thought was his destiny. You can't fix it.
And Virginia Woolf would become a threat to me with her brilliance so I would have to make her stay with Allison or Jill ("She's so quick. She writes like ten poems a day. And they're good. I hate her face. Just let her stay with you. Also, she keeps crying.")
Or maybe the three of us would sit down in my living room and just talk and eat Chinese food.
"Thank you," they'd say in unison, marveling at the 21st century poem that is General Tso's chicken. "This is fun."
"I didn't know that so many people would be reading my books," Virginia might say.
"People don't really listen," Ernest might say. He's tipsy.
"I was out here listening all this time," I might reply.
nice.
ReplyDelete