When we returned to San Francisco the following weekend, the apartment I had used the week before was taken by someone more important than me. The firm put us up in the usual hotel, south of Market, but I begged my wife to get out of the city. We decided to rent a car and drive south along the coast, though actually I cannot recall deciding this. I only said, We’ve already seen everything in the city. Maybe we should stay in, or leave the city altogether. This drive was either my wife’s idea or the concierge’s, and I think I must have objected, perhaps even refused, but, either way, I found myself behind the wheel of the rental car, having passed over the Bay Bridge into Oakland and down through San Jose, cutting across the mountains to Santa Cruz, where we would meet up with Highway 1.
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Man is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.
(Blaise Pascal, Pensees)
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In October of 1979, a woman named Jane or Janie Wilmot climbed over the railing of the Golden Gate Bridge onto the metalwork below. Just past her toes there was nothing at all for 245 feet or four seconds, all the way down to the water. A man climbing over next to her — did he say anything to her? — tripped over something and let go of the railing. He fell over backwards, out into the air. Up on the bridge, it would have been impossible to hear the splash four seconds later. A second man, wearing a top hat and a tailcoat, toasted Wilmot with a flute of champagne. She jumped, and in that moment, Wilmot became the first female bungee jumper. A camera crew on the bridge captured several jumps, then, with the police on their way, got on their bicycles and rode south, towards the city. They stopped at Fort Point to film the cords hanging from the bridge, standing in the spot where Madeleine and Scottie had stood twenty years earlier. By the time the crew got to Fort Point, though, Wilmot had already entered the water and been rescued by boat.
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Garrett Soden, author of the book Falling: How Our Greatest Fear Became Our Greatest Thrill, likens a long fall to a three-act tragedy: “the leap, the fall, the impact.” He writes, “The second act functions as it does in any tragedy: it reveals that the victim’s moral failure will lead to a horrible end — and that nothing can be done to stop it.” Is the fear of heights then ultimately a fear of being discovered (by oneself), of having one’s moral failings put on display (to oneself)? Is Scottie’s acrophobia just a symptom of his guilty conscience? And guilty of what? Why?
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During the construction of his famous Tower, Gustave Eiffel wrote, “Whether a man fell from forty meters or three hundred meters, the result was the same — certain death.” So, for those of us afraid of heights, afraid of falling, it is not the result that worries us; it is the length of the fall leading up to it. Perhaps we fear what will go through our minds in those moments. We fear the fear of death more than we fear death itself. Our minds, it would seem, turn in upon themselves naturally.
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Above a phone on the Golden Gate, the words: “THE CONSEQUENCES OF JUMPING FROM THIS BRIDGE ARE FATAL AND TRAGIC.”
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A child’s desire for a doll to come to life may become, in adulthood, a fear.
(Gaby Wood, Edison’s Eve)
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The more images I gathered from the past
the more unlikely it seemed that the past had actually happened
in this way or that, but rather one had pulled back from the edge
and for that moment it all came rushing in.
(Ronk, Vertigo)
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If I see the body I was looking for it is almost always mine.
(Ronk, Vertigo)
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It was thus without planning it or even willing it that my wife and I came to be at San Juan Bautista on a day that was sunny but not particularly warm, looking at each other as though something neither one of us could name had stirred up an old enmity that had arisen from yet another mystery. She pulled me along as though I was resisting, but I was not resisting, or else I felt I was not resisting. I had no reason to, although I was conscious of not wanting to reopen old wounds. But that had never been within my power, had it? Perhaps it was that that I was afraid of — that I had no control over what I could see coming.
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In Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s novel, Tomorrow’s Eve, Lord Celian Ewald, distraught at finding himself in love with Miss Alicia Clary, a woman he despises (Villiers’s characters are, it needs to be said, extraordinarily misogynistic), tells his friend, the American inventor Thomas Edison, that he is going to commit suicide. Edison, to save his friend’s life, proposes to replace his friend’s lover with an android named Hadaly, an android that will have all of Lord Ewald’s lover’s physical qualities as well as “a sublime spiritual presence” (as opposed to the coarse “spiritual presence” Lord Ewald describes as belonging to his lover). Edison proceeds to show off to Lord Ewald his invention, going so far as to perform an “autopsy” on it in his friend’s presence—”If you’re already familiar with the charm of the Android when she’s fully completed,” Edison explains, “no explanation can keep you from feeling that charm — any more than seeing the flayed skin of your living beauty would prevent you from loving her still, if afterwards she appeared before your eyes as she is today.”
Hadaly’s movements and her finer gestures are made possible through a mechanism Edison describes as “the exact analogy of those so-called barrel organs, on the cylinders of which are encrusted, as there are on this, a thousand little metallic points. Each of these points,” Edison tells Lord Ewald, “plucks a particular tone at a particular time and thus the cylinder plays exactly all the notes of a dozen different dance airs or operative operas. So here; the cylinder, operating on a complex of electrical contacts leading to the central inductors of the Android, plays
. all the gestures, the bearing, the facial expressions, and the attitudes of the woman that one incarnates in the Android.” The android’s palate is thus limited in its scope, as are its exclamations: Hadaly’s speech, Edison explains, is phonographically recorded sound.
Lord Ewald objects. “To hear exactly the same words for ever and ever? To see them always accompanied by the same expression, even though it’s an admirable one?” To which Edison rebuts, “The man who loves, doesn’t he repeat at every instant to his beloved the three little words, so exquisite and so holy, that he has already said a thousand times over? And what does he ask for, if not the repetition of those three words, or some moment of grave and joyous silence?. It’s apparent that the best thing is to re-hear the only words that can raise us to ecstasy, precisely because they have raised us to ecstasy before. When one of these absolutely perfect moments brushes us with its wind, we are so constructed that we want no others, and we will spend the rest of our lives trying, in vain, to call this one back — as if the prey of the Past could ever be snatched from its jaws.”
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But just think how many little nothings like this, added one to the other, produce sometimes an irresistible impression! Think of all the nothings on which Love itself depends!