A long time ago, before I was married, I read a book about ancient Greek. It was during a period when I was particularly interested in Greece, and went to the Peloponnese with a boyfriend whom I lived with for a while on the long finger of the Mani that juts impertinently into the sea, where we both tried to write, but mostly just fucked and fought savagely in a tiny cottage infested with rats. The book was filled with many fascinating things, and I remember that it went quite deeply into the ancient Greek words for time, for which there were two: chronos, which referred to chronological time, and kairos, used to signify an indeterminate period in which something of great significance happens, a time that is not quantitative but rather has a permanent nature, and contains what might be called “the supreme moment.” And as I lay in Kafka’s bed, it seemed that what was gathering up all around me was that kind of time, and that when I was well enough again, I would endeavor to sift through it all to locate the supreme moment around which my life until now had secretly coalesced. Finding this needle in the haystack seemed to me of urgent importance, as presumably the moment had come and gone without my having the least understanding of what it had offered. I became convinced that it must have come along during my childhood, come like a moth going toward the light, only to slam into an obtuse screen, a screen newly placed there by some nascent responsibility to what was expected of me now that I was eight or ten, whereas before I lived with all of my windows and doors wide open to the night. I remembered that from that book I’d read in the front garden of the cottage, while in the kitchen the rats were scurrying along the weighted pulleys that held up the shelves, and in the shade of the back garden the boyfriend was producing pages upon pages as if just innocently passing time while he waited for me to find yet another reason to unleash on him my fury—from that book, I’d also learnt that in the ancient art of rhetoric, the word kairos referred to the passing instant when an opening occurs that must be driven through with force, with all the force one can muster if one wishes to overwhelm any remaining resistance. And now I grasped that, in my ignorance, I’d failed to seize upon or even recognize this instant, which—had I possessed the necessary force—might have allowed me to break right through to that other world I’d always sensed existed beneath. In my obliviousness, I’d missed my chance, and since then I’d had to resort to trying to claw my way there with my fingernails.
Sometimes I believed it was Kafka’s bed, and sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I think I almost forgot, blissfully, who Kafka even was. His suitcase stood by the door, but at times I no longer remembered who it belonged to, or what was in it, though I never lost the sense that it mattered very much, and that whatever happened to me now, I couldn’t lose it. That somewhere somebody’s life, perhaps my own, depended on it. Sometimes I called the dog Kafka, as the name was readily available, and because using it for the dog felt like a stroke of lucidity. She came, too, though by then she was so hungry, the poor animal, that she probably would have answered to anything. Maybe it was that hunger that brought out such a deep intelligence in her eyes. I gave the dog whatever I could find in the cupboard. I think she took this to be a greater sacrifice than it was, and it aroused her loyalty. But by the time I became ill, there was very little left in the house for either of us to eat, except for a large supply of a peanut-flavored snack called Bamba. When she heard the familiar crinkling of the bags, she would come immediately. Great clouds of dust or maybe dry skin would rise up from her when she shifted, and I got it into my head that this, too, was a form of time, of whatever time she had left.
Sometimes I addressed the dog. Long monologues, to which she would listen with ears pricked as she wolfed down pieces of snack from my pocket. Once, all out of Bamba, I turned to her and said, “Why don’t you have a corned beef sandwich?” which is what my grandfather said to me from his hospital bed, right before he asked me if he was dead yet. But I knew I wasn’t dead; on the contrary, there were moments that I felt, in that illness, thrillingly alive. More alive, I think, than I had felt since I was a child. Awake to the sound of many kinds of wind, and the swelling and contracting of the house, the wings of a fly caught in a web who had not yet given up, and the low, steady note of sunlight playing across the floor. I had always been a little feral in my ways, despite all of the domestic fuss I’d made to the contrary, but left alone now, stroked by fever, I gave up on washing my clothes in the sink and slept often during the day and awoke at night and didn’t bother to brush my hair or sweep the floor, which was slowly being covered with the fine grit of the desert. In the closet I found an old wool coat, and I took to wearing this, even to bed. When the pain became unbearable, I would seize on some small discoloration on the wall or ceiling, or a smudge of dirt on the window, and force myself on this tiny defect with enormous intensity, boring down on it with every last shred of concentration. Either as a result of this, or of the patience that naturally develops from being alone and confined to bed, I slowly became aware of a sharpening of my vision, and after experimenting with this clarity, studying the fibers on the blanket that stood up like the hairs on an insect’s leg, I discovered that I could also apply it when looking inward. For a while, it seemed to me that I needed only to brandish the razor of my acuity for the subject, whatever it was, to immediately surrender itself up to be flayed. But then a foreboding thought cast a shadow over the rest, blunt and unadorned, and it was simply this: that for most of my life I had been emulating the thoughts and actions of other people. That so much that I had done or said had been a mirror of what was done and said around me. And that if I continued in this manner, whatever glimmers of brilliant life still burned in me would soon go out. When I was very young it had been otherwise, but I could hardly recall that time, it was buried so far below. I was only certain that a period had existed in which I looked at the things of the world without needing to make them subordinate to order. I simply saw, with whatever originality I was born with, the whole of things, without needing to give them a human translation. I would never again be able to see like that, I knew that, and yet, lying there, it seemed to me that I’d failed to fulfill the promise of that vision I once had, before I began to slowly learn to look at everything the way others looked, and to copy the things they said and did, and to shape my life after theirs, as if no other range of being had ever occurred to me.