The moment of knowing
“Any life is made up of a single moment,” Jorge Luis Borges wrote, “the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.” I came upon this the other day, and it has stayed with me ever since, as much in my heart as on my mind, stirring up my memory and exciting my imagination.
For I believe it is true. I have long thought that I became who I am when I was 15. I think I even know the moment it happened — late one Sunday afternoon in May when I was out hiking by myself. Solitude and sunlight and I merged into an uncanny sense of temporal and spatial distance. I suddenly felt somehow different from the person who had set out that day.
Borges, however, is not only saying that it takes but a moment to discover who one is, but also that this moment of self-discovery in some way constitutes one’s entire life. That may seem something of a stretch, but again, I think I know what he means. One night, a few years ago, I was standing in my garden when that Sunday afternoon long ago became suddenly present to me. I put it that way because it wasn’t just being reminded of something long past and remembering it. It was much more vivid than that. It was as if the present moment had become transparent and I could see that earlier day as the palimpsest upon which all of my life had, in fact, been written.
But how can a moment that took place decades ago be thought to embrace a life made up of countless moments since? Well, time as measured by clocks and watches is one thing. Time as experienced — psychological time — is not so straightforward. “What then is time?” St. Augustine asked. “If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
Most of us, I suspect, have known people whose lives seem entirely circumscribed by something that happened to them when they were children. We may advise them to let go of the past, but the problem is not that they cling to the past, but rather that the past clings to them and they do not — or cannot — take steps to shake it off.
At any rate, the notion that a moment can define a life is hardly unfamiliar. But we seem more ready to acknowledge it when the effect is imprisoning rather than liberating. This is hardly surprising. Constraint makes itself felt. Freedom tends to be taken for granted.
In my own case, the moment I have spoken of seems not so much to have embraced my life as to have caused it to curve back on itself, giving it form and proportion. To put this another way, it seems to have served as a leitmotif, appearing throughout my life in all sorts of permutations.
So who exactly is the person I became that day? Well, persons can only be described, not defined, and one’s sense of self is like the feeling a musician has for tempo and dynamics.
In many ways I was a typical teen. I dressed the way everybody did, listened to the same music, went to the same movies, and watched the same stuff on TV.
But I was also a loner, with a deep-seated, instinctive reluctance to run with any crowd. On weekends, I would often take the el into Center City Philadelphia, make my way to the art museum, and just look at paintings that struck my fancy and try to figure out what it was about them that I liked.
It was around this time that I discovered classical music and first tried my hand at writing poetry. These were things best kept to oneself in those days — at least in the working-class milieu I grew up in. One shared them with others only after making sure those others could be trusted.
The upshot is that all these things — and some others besides, I suppose — coalesced one sunny afternoon in such a way that I recognized them as the active ingredients of my identity. I saw who I was and was pleased with what I saw. Most of all, I didn’t give a damn whether anyone else agreed.
“To fall in love with oneself,” Oscar Wilde observed, “is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” I guess he was right. Today, when I look in the mirror, I see gray and thinning hair, a beard gone white, and deepening lines and creases. But the person looking in the mirror still feels like the one I first became acquainted with on a solitary hike half a century ago. I remain fond of him.
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A lovely piece. And because you remain fond of that person, others are fond of him as well.
This piece is a crystalline gem.