The Self I Was Promised

On his sixtieth birthday Edmund opened the diary he had kept faithfully since the age of nineteen and was introduced, page by page, to a man he had never met.

He had begun the diaries as an act of fidelity — to himself, he supposed, though one is never so vague as when one is being most sincere. The premise was simple and, he now saw, preposterous: that by setting down each day's residue he would build a bulwark against the erosion of time, a continuous self he could consult and trust. He had imagined memory as a ledger that the diaries would merely audit. He had not understood that the auditor and the accounts would, over forty years, diverge until they no longer recognised one another's signatures.

Take the matter of his father. Edmund remembered — remembered with the warm, burnished certainty one reserves for one's foundational myths — a man of reticent tenderness, who had taught him to fish in companionable silence and whose rare praise had been the currency of his childhood. The diary disagreed. The diary, in the cramped hand of a twenty-three-year-old, recorded a martinet, a man of glacial disapproval and surgical contempt, whose silences had been not companionable but punitive. Both men could not be his father. And yet both were vouched for — one by the unimpeachable witness of memory, the other by the unimpeachable witness of the contemporaneous page. He stood between two documents, each calling the other a liar, and discovered that he had no casting vote.

This was the vertigo that took him that birthday afternoon and did not quite let go. We are accustomed to think of the past as a fixed country, foreign perhaps, but at least stable — a place we may misremember the way one misremembers a city, getting the streets wrong while the city stands. Edmund now suspected the city itself was being rebuilt nightly, that every act of recollection was an act of composition, and that the self he had been promised — the continuous, accountable man who could stand at sixty and own his nineteen — was a fiction he had been coauthoring with his own forgetting all along.

The cruel elegance of it was that the diary did not save him from this. The diary deepened it. For he could not even trust the diarist. The boy of twenty-three had his own agenda, his own grievances, his own need to cast his father as villain so that he, the diarist, might be the aggrieved hero of his own composed pages. Each version of the self had falsified the record on behalf …. The diary was not a corrective to memory; it was an earlier draft of the same self-serving novel, written closer to the events and therefore, if anything, more partisan, more inflamed, less to be trusted than the emollient forgiveness that time had since applied.

He poured a drink, which the diarist would have noted censoriously and which the rememberer was inclined to excuse, and he understood that even this small act was being recorded twice and would be remembered a third way, and that none of the three Edmunds — the drinker, the future rememberer, the long-dead diarist glowering from the page — would ever sit down at one table and agree. He was not a man. He was a committee, convened across sixty years, perpetually in recess, whose minutes contradicted each other and whose chairman had long since lost the thread.

And yet. (He noticed the and yet; he had spent a lifetime noticing the and yet; it was the one reflex that survived all his selves.) There was a strange absolution in it. If there was no single continuous Edmund to be held to account, then the boy's bitterness was not his to carry, and the father's coldness — whether real or confected — was not a debt outstanding against a single ongoing soul. The tyranny of the continuous self, he saw, was also its burden: to be one person across time is to owe, forever, the debts of someone you can no longer find. To be a committee is to be, in a sense, forgiven — by adjournment, by turnover, by the simple mercy of not being, quite, the one who did it.

He took up his pen, because he was, after all, a diarist, and a diarist writes. Sixty today, he began, and then he paused, and then, in defiance of forty years of method, he set down nothing further — leaving the rest of the page white, an honest vacancy, the truest entry of his life: a record of the one day on which he had finally declined to invent himself.