Between Timid and Timbuktu: Life Experience, Death Experience, and a Love Story

Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come. ¹

Synopsis

After losing his wife, David falls into despair, haunted by thoughts about time. In an accident, the dock in front of his studio collapses, sending a fisherman into the water. David rescues the fisherman in time, only to find him showing no signs of life. He calls for Dr. Boyle, and the fisherman miraculously revives, recalling a detail from his childhood. David hopes the doctor can replicate this miracle of resurrection for him, but is refused. So he devises a secret plan: pretend to suffer a minor illness, lure the doctor over, then induce his own near-death state, forcing the doctor to save him. The plan proceeds smoothly, but when David enters the near-death state, the doctor, already at the door, turns back to attend to an emergency premature birth…

Vonnegut’s American prose style is lean, fluid, captivating, and thought-provoking. It has no ornamented language; reading it is never difficult (especially compared to something like Thomas the Obscure, the most opaque, tangled, unspeakable prose imaginable; I’d rather not say how dizzy it made me). At the same time, this Vonnegut story makes no attempt to conceal its themes, presenting everything through a performance-like effect. Compared to writers from other countries, many American fiction writers are more closely connected to theater, television, and film as media: Raymond Carver, Shirley Jackson, Jennifer Egan, J. D. Salinger, among others. They excel at building images and scenes, constructing dialogue, and evoking mood.

The first paragraph of this story already contains a wealth of information: David’s despair, the death of his wife Janet and the background of peacetime, the old fisherman’s concentration. The meaning of the title is revealed by the third paragraph: the dictionary entry between Timid and Timbuktu is Time.

He longed to understand time, to resist it, to defeat it, to go backward rather than forward, back to the moments with his wife Janet, back to the moments time had already swept clean.

The implicit conflict arises without warning. The poetry of this passage comes from a word that has been spoken countless times and will be spoken forever: time. Time wrote David’s tragedy. In his entanglement with time, David has already become the vanquished; like Laocoön, powerless, he can only capture with his mournful eyes the evidence of time’s transgressions in this world (such as the fading of ripples). David continually contemplates how human cognitive thresholds can feel and express the word time, longing to plunge headfirst into memories that will never return. But at this moment time challenges him again: the dock breaks, the fisherman falls in, David’s rescue efforts prove futile, and time once more carries away a stretch of life experience.

David’s understanding of time, like that of many ordinary people, is, in Bergson’s words, “linear.” Linear time as a concept is rigid and inflexible, like Deleuze’s “molar line.” David yearns for a means to resist the change that occurs within linear time, and such a means would necessarily overturn time’s linear character, shattering and recombining the single-threaded flow of time. This is the essence of David’s “time travel.” The time David seeks is time’s true face: time’s own image is ruptured and multi-layered. ²

Fortunately, Dr. Boyle arrives in time and revives the fisherman. David considers this a “resurrection,” but Dr. Boyle maintains his rigor, reserving judgment on whether his actions fit this concept, and declines to discuss the matter of life further. Clearly, Dr. Boyle does not position time as his adversary; he does not blame death on time. Besides, what the fisherman experienced was not death; strictly speaking, it was a “near-death state.” On this type of quasi-resurrection, Agamben contends that it is the “limit of language,” the place “where the question of the word begins”:

In fact, they were never really dead (otherwise they would not have come back to life), nor did they escape the inevitability that one day they would die; but they were freed from the representation of death. Thus, when asked what they had experienced, they have nothing to say about death, yet they found the question that might lead to many stories, and many good stories about their lives. ³

The fisherman experienced the interlayer between life experience and death experience. He did indeed give rise to a story, and David interpreted this story as “time travel.” Trapped in grief, David attempts to replicate this act, to draw out his own story: his story with his wife. David believes that memory during a near-death experience is a fault line of time, from which memory will be liberated and interwoven with the present state. Through “time travel,” David hopes to gain inner liberation and find his own way of being.

Yet there is a flaw in his plan, and this flaw is like a little joke, as slight as a ripple on the water. It is a deafening joke that time plays on David, helping him complete this outstanding work of art. No one knows whether David lives or dies, but as his vision blurs and his eyes are about to close, he sees a young couple at the door of his studio, as if time has unfolded a return at one point, and this return signifies a new becoming: not a simple cycle, but a repetition of difference. ⁴

The theme of love makes this story more than an inquiry into time. David’s love for his wife exceeds the scope of everyday experience and his own expressive threshold, compelling him to pursue a supernatural force to cross the boundary of life and death, to extract an entirely new life experience from the experience of near-death, to find a possibility that connects his daily life with his lost love, a possibility of life itself. He is searching for a reason related to love for his own existence.

Perhaps one could say this is a subversion of sekai-kei (セカイ系): it does not involve grand, spatial themes like the world or the globe, yet within David’s inner world, his love determines the meaning of the word “time.” Is that not equally grand? His love is wrapped in everything he does. This is his battle: not to annihilate time, but a courageous pardon of it.

In a little while he would die, visit eternity, then be resurrected, and tell the living that every moment of their lives is a part of the universe, as eternal as the greatest constellation. In people’s hearts, time would no longer be a killer.