Find Me

by André Aciman

It’s those we lost or who never knew we existed who leave their mark. The others barely echo.”

“As a French poet once said, some people smoke to put nicotine in their veins, others to put a cloud between them and others.”

None of us may want to claim to live life in two parallel lanes but all have many lives, one tucked beneath or right alongside the other. Some lives wait their turn because they haven’t been lived at all, while others die before they’ve lived out their time, and some are waiting to be relived because they haven’t been lived enough. Basically, we don’t know how to think of time, because time doesn’t really understand time the way we do, because time couldn’t care less what we think of time, because time is just a wobbly, unreliable metaphor for how we think about life. Because ultimately it isn’t time that is wrong for us, or we for time. It may be life itself that is wrong.”

Death is God’s great blunder,

We pass along our shadow selves and entrust what we’ve learned, lived, and known to afterpeople. What else can we give those we’ve loved after we die than pictures of who we were when we were children and had yet to become the fathers they grew up to know. I want those who outlive me to extend my life, not just to remember it.”

“What these men have to offer I already have. And everything they want they don’t deserve, or I may not have in me to give. That’s the sad part.”

paradox is never an answer, it’s just a fractured truth, a wisp of meaning without legs.

some people may be brokenhearted not because they’ve been hurt but because they’ve never found someone who mattered enough to hurt them.”

Goethe: “Everything in my life was merely prologue until now, merely delay, merely pastime, merely waste of time until I came to know you.”

You’re oxygen to me, and I’ve been living off methane.”

“Love is easy,” I said. “It’s the courage to love and to trust that matters, and not all of us have both.

knew, drunk as I was, that this, with Oliver holding me, was my life, that everything that had come beforehand with others was not even a rough sketch or the shadow of a draft of what was happening to me.

Fate works forward, backward, and crisscrosses sideways and couldn’t care less how we scan its purposes with our rickety little befores and afters.”

Perhaps he’d seen that sometimes it’s best to stop things when they’re perfect rather than race on and watch them sour.

You are unbelievably handsome. And the problem is either that you know it and are aware of its power over others or that you need to pretend not to—which makes you not just difficult to decipher but, for someone like me, dangerous.”

because I was trying and failing each time to think that I wasn’t losing my grip when I knew damn well that I was just desperately holding on to mere slivers of reality and feeling them slip from me, and feeling ecstatic each time they did, because I loved that he was seeing this happen to me, and I wanted him to see this on my face even while he was doing the most generous thing in the world, which was to wait and still wait while I kept repeating he wasn’t hurting me, wasn’t hurting me,

Time never casts shadows and memory doesn’t drop ashes.”

You know, life is not so original after all. It has uncanny ways of reminding us that, even without a God, there is a flash of retrospective brilliance in the way fate plays its cards. It doesn’t deal us fifty-two cards; it deals, say, four or five, and they happen to be the same ones our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents played. The cards look pretty frayed and bent. The choice of sequences is limited: at some point the cards will repeat themselves, seldom in the same order, but always in a pattern that seems uncannily familiar. Sometimes the last card is not even played by the one whose life ended. Fate doesn’t always respect what we believe is the end of a life.

It will deal your last card to

those who come after. Which is why I think all lives are condemned to remain unfinished. This is the deplorable truth we all live with. We reach the end and are by no means done with life, not by a long stretch! There are projects we barely started, matters unresolved and left hanging everywhere. Living means dying with regrets stuck in your craw. As the French poet says, Le temps d’apprendre à vivre il est déjà trop tard, by the time we learn to live, it’s already too late. And yet there must be some small joy in finding that we are each put in a position to complete the lives of others, to close the ledger they left open and play their last card for them. What could be more gratifying than to know that it will always be up to someone else to complete and round off our life? Someone whom we ...

Perhaps, says the genius, music doesn’t change us that much, nor does great art change us. Instead, it reminds us of who, despite all our claims or denials, we’ve always known we were and are destined to remain. It reminds us of the mileposts we’ve buried and hidden and then lost, of the people and things that mattered despite our lies, despite the years. Music is no more than the sound of our regrets put to a cadence that stirs the illusion of pleasure and hope. It’s the surest reminder that we’re here for a very short while and that we’ve neglected or cheated or, worse yet, failed to live our lives. Music is the unlived life. You’ve lived the wrong life, my friend, and almost defaced the one you were given to live.