Revision and Revenge
“Anxious to improve the nick of time...”
—Thoreau
ONCE, I TRIED to live the same day twice. My partner was traveling, and I had recently decided to quit my job, without immediate prospects. July in Berkeley: mild-mannered sun, not even the chance of a cloud. The foolishness of bemoaning such consistent niceness was part of my befuddlement. In several languages, the word that came to mean weather originally meant time (“tempestas” in Latin, English’s root for both “tempest” and “temporal”). Changes in the air have long corresponded to, and helped create, the nicks and notches by which people measure their moods. That summer, light on inner and outer weather alike, I hovered halfway over my life, with no notch to fix me in place.
When my unstructured solitude gaped particularly wide one morning, I propped myself in bed with coffee and my laptop. Inside its dark slot waited the public library’s copy of Sans Soleil, the quasi-documentary by Chris Marker. I loaded it up, wondering what our apartment neighbors a thin door away would think to hear a movie playing so early.
Soon I saw a group of three children, shock-blond in sunlight, wandering down the road away from the camera. Then we were on a ferry boat in Japan. Silent worshippers knelt at a temple dedicated to white cats. Accompanied by a mysterious voice—a narrator who spoke intimately but never introduced herself—certain image sequences lingered, while others
