Time Shelter

by Georgi Gospodinov

Where can we live but days? —Philip Larkin, “Days”

To be merciless toward the past. Because the past itself is merciless.

The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined.

Happened stories are all alike, every unhappened story is unhappened in its own way.

If we are not in someone else’s memory, do we even exist at all?

In all ancient epics, there is one strong enemy you battle—the Bull of Heaven and Gilgamesh, the monster Grendel, his mother, and finally the Dragon, which fatally wounds the already aged Beowulf, all the monsters, bulls, etc., in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Cyclops in the Odyssey, and so on . . . In modern-day novels these monsters have disappeared, the heroes are gone, too. When there are no monsters, there are no heroes, either. Monsters still do exist, however. There is one monster that stalks every one of us. Death, you’ll say, yes, of course, death is his brother, but old age is the monster. This is the true (and doomed) battle, with no flashiness, no fireworks, no swords inlaid with the tooth of Saint Peter, with no magical armor and unexpected allies, without hope that bards will sing songs about you, with no rituals . . . An epic battle with no epos.

If no one remembers becomes the equivalent of If there is no God. If there is no God, Dostoyevsky said, then everything is permitted. God will turn out to be nothing but a huge memory. A memory of sins. A cloud with infinite megabytes of memory. A forgetful God, a God with Alzheimer’s, would free us from all obligations. No memory, no crime.

Actually, our bodies turn out to be quite merciful by nature, a little amnesia rather than anesthesia at the end. Our memory, which is leaving us, lets us play a bit longer, one last time in the Elysian fields of childhood. A few well-begged-for, please-just-five-more minutes, like in the old days, playing outside in the street. Before we get called home for good.

Several world-renown scientists offered bees as an example and warned that what is happening with their mysterious disappearance, so-called colony collapse disorder, is actually the same as what the Alzheimer’s mechanism does to the human family.

Dying has gotten to be quite expensive. But was death ever free? Perhaps with pills it is slightly pricier, it’s harder with a gun, at least until you get your hands on one, but there are far simpler and perfectly free methods—drowning, jumping from a height, hanging. One woman I know told me: I feel like jumping off the roof, but when I think how messed up my hair will get as I’m falling, and who knows how wrinkled my skirt will get, full of stains and everything, and I start to feel ashamed and give up on the idea. After all, they still take pictures of you in those cases, right, people watch . . . Now, those are the signs of a healthy body—it feels ashamed, it foresees what might happen, it thinks about the future, and even after its death, it is vain. The body that truly desires death no longer experiences vanity.

Then comes assisted suicide. What an expression. Things have gotten so bad that you can’t do anything without an assistant, you can’t even die.

We are the world’s apocalypse. In that sense, we are also our own apocalypse.

The things I do not dare to do will transform into stories.

I no longer remember who said that a nation was a group of people who have agreed to jointly remember and forget the same things.

Warning, history in the rearview mirror is always closer than it appears

It was the worst with names. And when he had to switch languages, it was a nightmare. He would forget even the right phrase to use to apologize and ask: Sorry, your name escapes me . . . Sorry, your name . . . Every morning he would take a blank sheet of paper and write these five words out by hand. It reminded him of punishment from back in school, when he was forced to write out words he had gotten wrong or some minor infraction like “I forgot my homework” a hundred times. From here arose his early discovery that repetition changes meaning, it removes the bones and the sense of what is written. Repeated one hundred times, everything (including guilt) disintegrates into meaningless syllables.

Whatever you read is what you shall become.

The less memory, the more past. As long as you remember, you hold at bay the times gone by. Like lighting a fire in the middle of a forest at night. Demons and wolves are crouching all around, the beasts of the past are tightening the circle, but they still don’t dare step into it. The allegory is simple. As long as the flame of memory burns, you are the master. If it starts to die out, the howling grows louder and the beasts draw closer. The pack of the past.