The Tanners

Several minutes later she returned and, still at a distance of several paces, resumed the conversation by exclaiming: “How encompassed by novelty everything here is! Just look around: Everything is fresh, novel, newborn. Not a single memory of anything old! Usually every house, every family possesses some old piece of furniture, a whiff of olden times, a concrete souvenir that we still love and honor because we find it beautiful, just as we find a scene of parting or a melancholy sunset beautiful. Do you see anything of the sort here, even the faintest hint of memory? It seems to me like a dizzying, curved, light bridge leading into the as yet inexplicable future. Oh, to gaze into the future is more beautiful than dreaming about the past. It’s also a sort of dreaming when you imagine a future. Isn’t there something marvelous about this? Wouldn’t it be cleverer for persons of fine sensibilities to devote their warmth and inklings to the days yet to come rather than those that lie in the past? Times yet to come are like children to us and need more attention than the graves of the departed, which we adorn perhaps with somewhat too exaggerated a love: these bygone days! A painter will do well now to sketch costumes for distant people who will possess the grace to wear them in decorum and freedom; let the poet dream up virtues for strong individuals not gnawed at by longing, and the architect design as best he can forms that will charmingly give life to the stone and to building itself, let him go to the forest and there take note of how tall and noble the firs shoot up from the ground, let him take them as a model for the buildings of the future; and let man in general, in anticipation of things to come, cast off much that is common, ignoble and unserviceable, and whisper his thoughts into the ear of his wife as clearly as he can when she offers him her lips for a kiss, and the woman will smile. We women understand how to spur you men on to perform deeds with our smiles, and we fancy we’ve done our duty when we’ve succeeded in vividly, delightfully filling your senses with your own duties, just by virtue of a smile. The things you achieve make us happier than our own accomplishments. We read the books you write and think: If only they were willing to do a bit more and write a bit less. In general we don’t know what would bring much more profit than subordinating ourselves to you. What else can we do! And how willingly we do so. But now of course I’ve forgotten to speak of the future, this bold arch across dark waters, this forest full of trees, this child with gleaming eyes, this unspeakable entity that always tempts one to catch it in words as if in a snare. No, I believe the present is the future. Doesn’t everything around us seem to radiate presentness?”

“Yes,” Simon said.

“Outside the winter’s so horribly severe now, and here indoors it’s so warm, so perfect for having conversations and for my sitting here beside you, a quite young and apparently somewhat down-at-the-heels person, and any minute now I’ll be neglecting my duties. Your comportment has something fascinating about it, do you realize this? One can’t help wanting to box your ears straight off, out of a secret fury at the way you sit here so foolishly and yet have such a strange capacity to seduce a person into wasting her precious time with you, a random guest. Do you know what: Why don’t you go on sitting there a while longer. Surely you’re not in so much of a hurry. I’ll come back later to have another crack at your ears. For the moment, duty calls—”

And she was gone.