Find Me

by André Aciman

I had been invited to give a reading to university students. But I was also meeting my son, who lived in Rome and was picking me up at the station.

Dostoyevsky

Some of us never jumped to the next level. We lost track of where we were headed and as a result stayed where we started.”

“Perhaps because I am always trying to retrace my steps back to a spot where I should have jumped on the ferryboat headed to the other bank called life but ended up dawdling on the wrong wharf or, with

“Aren’t those the absolute worst scenarios: the things that might have happened but never did and might still happen though we’ve given up hoping they could.”

acquiescence.

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 death, contrary to what everyone tells you, is not part of life.

appearances, living and time are not aligned and have entirely different itineraries.

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

opsizo meant to arrive too late to the feast, or just before last call, or to feast today with the weight of all the wasted yesteryears.

Ee-jit.

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

vigil

Florian Quartet?

sauntering through

“But you didn’t know you’d meet me.” “A meaningless detail. Fate works forward, backward, and crisscrosses sideways and couldn’t care less how we scan its purposes with our rickety little befores and afters.”

canard!”

Brassaï effect?”

quince

cadenza.

sonata,

cadenza

Waldstein

staves

desultory

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.

forbearance.

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.

Music is the unlived life.