Sometimes I sense that to put real confidence in my memory I have to get to the end of all rememberings. That seems to say that I forego remembering. And now that strikes me as an accurate description of what it is to have confidence in one's memory.
          --Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason

I remember reading a story in Alfred Hitchcock's mystery magazine-book on the beach in Bellagio, probably the last summer we were there, when I was twelve. The story was about the possibility of going to another world, a utopian world open to people who longed enough for its spirit of cooperation and generosity. You went to a travel agency, and if you looked like the right type of person and asked with the right mixture of subtlety and humility about this possibility, you might be told about it by the eerily knowing agent at the counter. I remember that he explained to the protagonist that this other world was both far away and not -- that it was like going to dinner at someone's apartment which shared a wall with yours, but to get to it you had to go out your front door, down the elevator, around the block, into the other building and through the front door of the other apartment. This other, Utopian world had vacuum cleaners but no TVs; busses but no cars (maybe: it's the vacuum cleaners I really remember and was impressed by). The protagonist is accepted and he sits in a waiting room with other travellers. Then he panics, and leaves the room. Then he regrets his panic and returns to it. But they're gone. He goes back to the travel agent and asks to be re-accepted to the utopian pioneers. But the travel agent feigns blank incomprehension. He's missed his chance forever.

I remember this story pretty well. I was surprised, yesterday, when a student in my Hitchcock class showed me a hardcover best-of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine that the story turned out to be by Jack Finney, whose Time and Again and From Time to Time are pretty marvelous evocations of time travel and the reality of the past. Time and Again was a book I inherited from someone, but I can't remember whom. It had a green hard cover, and it sat on the middle shelf of my right hand book case in my room for a while. I didn't read it at the time though. (The hero lives at the Beresford, just after it's built, where later John Lennon would be shot. I always confused the Beresford with the building in Rosemary's Baby, which is, I believe, slightly uptown, on Central Park West.) But had I recognized the name from the story, which turns out to be called "Of the Missing," I would have read it immediately.

The story was magical, and the sense of loss at its end palpable. It was maybe the first story that I ever read that was about itself, about the fact that it ended. The protagonist lost his access to that marvelous other world, and so did I: the story was over.

So of course when I saw the story again -- I only looked it up in my student's book because I saw the author's name, not because I recognized the title -- I was slightly disconcerted. I had to check to make sure it was the same story (it was), but only as cursorily as possible, since I know that if I reread it now, I'd lose its magic forever, more conclusively even than its hero loses his access to that other world.

posted by william 4:29 PM
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