In thoughts stunning as camera flashes, Fox knits her past together. She presents startling images and unforgettable stories. She compresses narrative time, moving fluidly from the young Fox to the older one, to measure first reactions and impressions against the insights of retrospection. She is honest, more severe with herself than anyone else. “I knew so little, and the little I did know, I didn’t understand. My ravenous interest in those days was aroused by anything.”
Sir Andrew assigns her to Warsaw, where “to walk. was to feel the cold and desolation and silence of a city of the dead.” Here and elsewhere, Fox encounters people who pose great paradoxes and enigmas. There is troubling Mrs. Helen Grassner, a Jewish-American, middle-aged woman, who searches Poland for Jews and who grieves, because she didn’t lose any of her family in the camps. With her, some other journalists and three Czechs who’d been in camps, Fox tours the Polish countryside, courtesy of the Polish government. They visit “a former vacation estate of a Prussian aristocrat,” now a home for traumatized children “who had been born [or spent some time] in concentration camps. [though] their parents, without exception, had been murdered by the Nazis.” A 19-year-old man, formerly a member of a Young Fascists organization, follows her one night and, in shadow, whispers of his thrill at watching executions. She rushes away, feeling disgust, hatred, and also a little sympathy for his abject, ruined life. Much later, working as a tutor for institutionalized, orphaned teenagers in New York, she remembers the children born in camps, their “stunted little weeping figures.”
Chekhov’s stories come to mind, his portrayals of ethical dilemmas, human ugliness and pathos, their unquestionable beauty and compassion. The Coldest Winter accounts for a year or so in Fox’s life, but even more it asks how and why her or anyone’s experience matters. Fox’s past lies between and within the lines of other lives, her history inseparable from the greater one, and nothing she reports is reduced to a truism or general statement. Now, as she looks back, the endurance of memories is a mystery, haphazard as life itself.
In this and her novels, Fox chooses words so splendidly a reader must contend with how language can and cannot allow events and emotions to be rendered. Notably, Fox marks tragedy and “outrageous fortune” with a delicate hand. The enormity of the Holocaust is, in a grave sense, beyond words, so the fewer the better. By her discretion, this reader thought often of Primo Levi’s writings and teachings. The uncaptioned photographs that are interspersed sparely throughout the book add to an idea of memory’s elusiveness, and how very much more is forgotten. The pictures may be of a person or place Fox has just mentioned. Or, untitled, they may suggest that Paula Fox’s experiences, the people she met, places she visited, can also represent those lost to history, unsung and anonymous. Her “year over there,” she writes, “had shown me something other than myself.”
F is for the Future
1995
You asked how I’m spending my time when I’m not watching the OJ trial. On the Internet at a friend’s house. Testing my limits in the screen/face of seeming limitlessness, testing the machinery before I buy into it totally or semi-totally. (Reminds me of an aristocratic English guy I knew who was asked, after he crashed his car into two police cars, why he’d done it, why he’d wantonly wrecked those cars, and he answered: I was testing my machinery. His machinery worked — his grandfather’s a lord, he wasn’t in Bow Street jail even an hour.) My digression, association, isn’t really wack; it’s part of what the thing’s about — relating, associating, digressing. As well as limits. Because while you seem to be homing in on or sensing the infinite, “accessing” an infinite variety, inundated with choices, threads and threads, you can feel powerless or powerful, depending upon how you navigate in a ocean/notion like, the infinite is in a machine on your desk. Some people might develop a cortisone-type high, imagining everything in the machine is them, they can master the course/ship; others will get lost at sea, devastated by how much they can’t do. I have both feelings. (You know I question the idea of access anyway.) Remember when I bought my computer years ago and fell in love with the delete key, wanted to delete everything. Sea metaphors — you “navigate” on the Internet. A new frontier, discoveries are expected, a journey, a narrative, and some new terms specific to it. I like seeing the way old words appear in new contexts as new clothes. Weirdly predictable material in a new world is expected. Remember how carrying a Porta-Pak was going to change everything? It’s important to believe you redo it all with new techie toys, I guess, so even if the Internet carries old problems, it adds possibility, promise and dimension, some new problems, has effects no one can absolutely predict. Obviously your own little world is instantly changed, how you spend your time, whom you meet and what happens to you in cyberspace. You might learn to have different expectations, when people talk the talk, cyberspeak, a telegraphic shorthand. But how will sociality change — did the telephone change how people relate to each other, do we know? How will people’s minds change or be changed? Technology and science are already so embedded in our thinking and lives, maybe it’s impossible to recognize it. I keep remembering Wittgenstein’s horror of science, his fury at the growing dependence on it.
Traveling into libraries, cool; I hated returning books (but library as physical space, as possible sanctum, will be missed; the idea will be missed). The ability to “access” knowledge replays the old Information v. Knowledge prizefight. What’s knowledge? I can see, so can you, the movies, mixing animation with live action, the cyber world entering the “real” world, boring. A TV sitcom with the nerd at the computer, all the trouble he — maybe she — gets into. You know. But what’s interesting is you can’t encompass it, you ride it, surf it (I skim it), you choose. (You have to pick Echo, Panix, Netcom, America Online, Compuserve, one of the delivery systems first, which reminded me of another great divide: IBM or Mac.) Immediately arresting and annoying, to me, overwhelming, the magnitude. What you decide to look into and lurk around, voyeuristically, is self-evidentiary. (Watching trials has changed me. I get worse all the time.)
A showbiz gossip group—“Keanu Reeves’ publicist, Robert Garlock, has just issued a release stating that Keanu has never met David Geffen and Keanu is not gay. Any comments, folks?”
A group around dry cleaning—“All of my suits have cleaning labels that say ‘Professionally dry clean only.’ Has anyone ever heard of an amateur dry cleaner?” “Actually, yes: there used to be, and perhaps still are, coin-operated dry-cleaning machines.”
“The Extropians”—“The Extropy Institute now has an official home page and a gopher site as well. Extropian interests include transhumanism, futurist philosophy, personality uploading, critical analysis of environmentalism. ”
(I love the use of the word gopher; the hiddenness of cyber-places realized by a furry, furtive animal is futurist anthropomorphism.)