In the beforetime

billzhao

In the Beforetime
" T% B& ^( y0 R6 U% b! R“I could sense in my bones that the worst had happened, yet a road trip allowed time and space for disbelief. Disbelief is a kind of hope.”
By Yiyun Li
July 4, 2022
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Two trips, two poets, two permanent farewells: this is one way of framing a particular week in my life. It was September, 2017, which, seen from 2022, could nearly be called the good old days. Yet so rarely do we look at the present, innocent of fresh disaster, as a rosy beforetime: we live in the aftertime of events, some more catastrophic than others.
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I was in London for William Trevor’s memorial and had planned to go to Hull to see a Philip Larkin exhibition. “Will you be taking the train or driving?” a friend asked over tea and cake. I said I always take the train when one is available. Five days later, I was planning to visit the Emily Dickinson Museum, in Amherst, Massachusetts. The distance between London and Hull is the same as the distance between Princeton, where I live, and Amherst: a little more than two hundred miles, but for the Amherst trip my only reasonable option was to drive. We talked about the two poets, complex figures who had chosen not to become parents. We talked about British and American politics, post Brexit referendum, post 2016 election. It was one of those conversations: predictable, inevitable, only marginally memorable.
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. b: g9 _0 }( V) l0 v0 U; KThe Larkin exhibition was in the university library at Hull, where he’d served as a librarian. It displayed hundreds of personal items: his collection of ties; letters to his mother, neatly stacked in a glass case, their contents protected from voyeuristic eyes; a minute Hitler figurine, which had belonged to Larkin’s father; the hard covers and spines of Larkin’s diaries, among them one decorated with collages of scantily dressed women cut out of magazines (the insides of those diaries, which he had entrusted to Monica Jones, his longtime companion, had been shredded shortly after his death).
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# b# [8 c% Y& j! ^6 K) MThe Emily Dickinson Museum, which is made up of two houses, including the one Dickinson lived in, would offer a more intimate milieu: wallpapers, curtains, mirrors, teacups, books. All these I have not laid eyes on, and perhaps never will. Shortly after I arrived at my hotel in Amherst, in the early afternoon, a text message prompted me to return to the reception desk. I checked out and rushed to my car. I might have driven past Dickinson’s house that day, but I wouldn’t have noticed.

A road trip by car has some advantages: flexibility (a train won’t change its schedule for personal emergencies); alternative routes to bypass traffic (which my G.P.S. directed me to do on that day); a secluded space, where one can despair and hope, free from the world’s gaze. A train, on the other hand, makes a public stage for private woes. I had booked a seat in the quiet carriage for my trip to Hull. When the train left King’s Cross, the only other travellers were a pair of parents and their teen-age children, a boy and a girl. They sat down at a table across the aisle from me, took out a pack of cards, and began a jubilant game.
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“Excuse me,” I said, pointing to a sign. “This is a quiet car.”

“A quiet carriage?” the father said. “That won’t do!”

/ t- u  E8 T" vWon’t do for what—I marvelled—or for whom? “You can go to another car if you want to play.”
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“We booked these seats,” he said.

0 X+ Q0 P8 j% a! Z, F“You booked a quiet carriage.”

! w+ L: X& `. w7 {! `He turned to his wife. “Did I tell you to book a quiet carriage?”

4 @  [# {; j9 J' N" fShe searched in her purse for their tickets, looked at them, and said nothing. The boy put down a card, and they resumed the game, the mother playing silently, the children speaking in stage whispers, the father at his normal volume. I turned toward the window and watched the reflection of the family with a detached interest, which is to say, I despised the man, pitied the woman, and tried to read the children’s feelings.
At the next station, a man with a backpack boarded. What followed was a routine drama. The man admonished the family. They played on in hushed tones; even the father lowered his voice. Then the father’s phone rang, and he began an uninhibited conversation. The man yelled at the father. The mother studied her cards, held in both hands, arranged evenly. Had they been travelling by car, she wouldn’t have booked the wrong carriage. Her husband might still have found fault with her, but she would have suffered away from a stranger’s scrutiny. Even so, they would have been the same family: a car or a train is only the context.
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5 ], v2 v- @. r; m& o& P1 z; nLater that week, I would be driving through an autumn sunset, calling my son’s number, reaching the voice mail every time. I could sense in my bones that the worst had happened, yet a road trip allowed time and space for disbelief. Disbelief is a kind of hope.

0 p2 e& c% q: ]+ q& UI arrived home after nightfall. Two police detectives and a uniformed officer met me. When I think about that week, I often think about the family on the train to Hull, carved into my memory the way passersby are accidentally caught in a snapshot. We were fellow-travellers in the beforetime: what difference did it make that they were noisy in a quiet carriage? ♦

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Published in the print edition of the July 11 & 18, 2022, issue.
$ J) _, k$ V& s  xYiyun Li won a 2020 Windham Campbell Prize. Her latest book is “Tolstoy Together: 85 Days of War and Peace with Yiyun Li.”