Everyone accepted the Memorandum for the Recent Past, which clarified the process for holding the referendum in EU countries. Everything somehow took place more quickly and easily than expected.
And afterward they would agree on the various . . . pasts.
(Hm, this word isn’t usually used in the plural, well, what do you know. The past is only in the singular.)
5.
There are more and more signs of the coming of the past as I write this book. The time is near.
In Cuba they have banned the removal of old cars from the sidewalks because the tourists come specifically for them. Some countries are well supplied with history: Soviet Moskvitches and American Buicks sit there and rot next to each other, with bent wheel rims and flaking paint, while their rusting skeletons crumble, washed clean by the rain and dried by the Caribbean sun (like that marlin picked clean in The Old Man and the Sea).
I wonder, when the Second Coming finally arrives one day, whether old cars will also be resurrected.
TODAY IT SAYS IN THE paper that Germany has brought back typewriters to some of the top-secret government departments, in order to guard against leaks of information after a spy scandal a few years back. You can’t hack and drain a typewriter. I find this piece of news very telling. Back to the Brave Old Analog World.
IN THE UK MILKMEN ARE enjoying a resurgence and more and more people are ordering milk in glass bottles, delivered to their doors in the morning.
THE NEW ISSUE OF THE New Yorker has reprinted (for the first time) one of its old covers from 1927. What would happen if on one and the same day all the newspapers and magazines decided to reprint their old issues from a certain day fifty or sixty years ago? Would the wheel of time creak?
THERE’S NOW A RADIO STATION that plays whole days from different decades, with news, interviews, the entire program for a given day.
6.
The very definition of the recent past turned out to be the subject of more than a few arguments, and for that reason a compromise was reached in which the borders were left flexible. Countries just needed to remain within the confines of the twentieth century.
There was something romantically doomed about such a referendum, especially given the recent fiasco with Brexit, but in the end, shouldn’t people get to decide for themselves where they wanted to live? Things imposed from the top down never worked anyway and only provoked irritation. The referendum was a terrible idea, but a better one, as they say, has yet to be proposed.
This will be our final attempt to survive in the face of an impossible future, the chairman in blue was saying, we must choose between two things—living together in a shared past, which we have already done, or letting ourselves fall apart and slaughtering one another, which we have also already done. Both options are legitimate. Remember that great line from Auden, We must love one another or die. He paused briefly and repeated it, deliberately lowering his voice, We must love one another or die, knowing full well that he was coining a slogan for the media to seize the next day.
I heard Gaustine behind every word. These people had finally learned to speak, or, rather, to listen.
7.
Sometimes names really are correct by nature, as is argued in Plato’s Cratylus. There is something telling in the very etymology of the word “referendum,” if we drill down to the Latin provenance of the verb re-ferro, which means to go back, to carry back.
Turning back was loaded into the very word, and nobody even realized it . . . A referendum on the past. Do language games, with their etymologies and tautologies, sometimes hint at more than we think? And through the trumpets of tautology, does the revelation of a new apocalypse arrive?
8.
First, a country that had always wondered whether or not it was part of the Continent set itself apart. Great Brexitania, as we called it then.
Literature is to blame for everything, I told Gaustine once.
As usual, he laughed.
More specially, Robinson Crusoe, I went on. The confidence that an island can give you everything you need to survive, sustenance, all of that comes straight from Defoe. I’ll be fine on my own, Robinson declares, God is with me. We’ll be fine on our own, his descendants say, God save the queen (but even without her, we’ll be fine).
Yes, Gaustine agrees, it would’ve been better if they’d read Donne instead of Defoe.
And suddenly, with his seventeenth century voice ringing out—I swear it was in that English from back then, declaiming that which we remember better thanks to a novel by Hemingway—he said:
No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde . . .
That’s the problem—Defoe defeated Donne, Gaustine said with a melancholy that could sink the whole British navy.
We were silent for a time and he repeated in his voice from the seventeenth century: any mans death diminishes me . . . Funny, we’ve always just skipped over the title: “Devotions upon Emergent Occasions.” And now the occasion is emergent.
Once again Great Britain presents a troublesome case. Given Brexit, it should remain outside the referendum. But a pro-European movement immediately reared up on the island, insisting that the UK should by rights be included in the referendum on the shared past, since during that very same past it had been part of Europe and the union. Every nation, just like every person, has its moments of madness, the movement declared, let’s give ourselves a historical second chance to shake off this madness.
The argument about a “historical second chance” was an exact quote from the preamble of the memorandum. But Brussels had gotten tired of British dithering in recent years and preferred to take a salubriously firm position. It refused the request.
9.
While these conversations were taking place, however, another miracle occurred. Switzerland, which has always been something like a hidden island within Europe, suddenly expressed the desire to join the Referendum on the Past. This was truly unexpected and headquarters in Brussels did not know how to respond for some time. All sorts of suspicions were whirling around as to why Switzerland would so blithely agree to violate its own traditions. Had it discovered a crack, a weak spot in the project that it could cleverly take advantage of? In the end, as part of a cautious agreement with several additional clauses, it was allowed to take part. Switzerland was an island, but it was also Europe in miniature. Where else could you see Germany, Italy, and France rolled into one? Thus, beyond the suspicions, there lay something very natural in its desire to try, albeit with a certain autonomy, to join the referendum.
10.
A Critical Deficit of Meaning
The acute phase of the disease is characterized by a sharp, strangling pain in various points on the body, which hampers precise diagnosis. Many patients report paroxysms in the late afternoon between three and six o’clock.
Difficulty breathing is one of the most commonly mentioned symptoms. A feeling of suffocation. I don’t have any strength, or any desire, to take a breath. I exhale and don’t know if there’s any point in inhaling again . . . I stopped buying calendars for the new year [N.R. 53, housewife].