Sergio Chejfec (1956–2022)

Lost in Repetitions

I start reading My Two Worlds. I've been looking forward to it. I’ve had it for over ten years. I found it in a little city bookshop that always has terrific little surprises, obscure books, small press books, interesting writers I cannot find elsewhere. I’d go there during lunch hours for the relief from dull working days. I’d buy books to console myself that at the end of the day there was something left of myself. Because most days, work is about other people – show more agendas, demands, directives. I live as the title suggests, in two worlds. The world of the book and the world where I have more choices. Like reading this book. I would get to the book shop via a route that takes me through historical streets and lanes, via underground walkways until I end up in another historical part of the city surrounded by plane trees. The walk is always refreshing. I start in one mood defined by workplace problems and emerge in another, regenerated, optimistic, my own self. The route is essential to the transformational state I experience by walking. It’s partly expectation that the journey would be the same, so there can be the expectation of joy at the end.

I read about twenty pages. And I’m enjoying myself. It’s cerebral, an ideas book. And I’m in the mood. My real self, the one that reads books is having a good time. Then I come across notes and under-linings. They are as interesting as the subject matter I've been reading. Here’s the first:

”When I walk my impression is that a digital sensibility overtakes me, one governed by overlapping windows. I say this not with pride but with annoyance: nothing worse could happen to me, because it affects my intuitive side and feels like a prison sentence. The places or circumstances that have drawn my attention take the form of Internet Links and this is only true for the objects themselves, which are generally urban, part of the life of the street or of the city as a whole, shaped precisely and distinguished from their surroundings, but also in the associations they call to mind, the recollections of what is observed, which may be related, kindred, or quite distinct, depend on whichever way these links are formed.”

I have to say, Chejfec echoes my thoughts exactly from ten or so years ago. But did I have those thoughts, or did I recall these words from another time?

I’ve read this book before. But when? They are MY underlinings. And did I in fact think exactly the same coincidence ten years ago, that my thoughts were echoed then.

Yes, there are two worlds and in both worlds I read this book. Or two different time frames. Because in the end, two different times are like two different worlds. And think how easily we slip from one time – when we open the computer to the time we finish. Time is meaningless, we exist in two zones. Yet, I have no recollection. Also underlined:

”On a walk an image will lead me into a memory or into several, and these in turn summon other memories or connected thoughts, often by chance, etc, all creating a delirious branching effect that overwhelms me and leaves me exhausted.”

The walk I take is part of my memory, a collection of experiences I repeat that form who I am. I often dream about that walk, or idly think about it. Never about the reason I needed to take that walk. I freely associate it with several books purchased at the end of the walk. And the joy I experienced as I walked back wondering when the opportunity would arise to read the book. Knowing of course that when I got back to work, the day would change, the switch would flick and everything would go back to the way it was. And when I get home, the patterns would repeat.

So you see, by accidentally reading this book twice, I repeat myself, my experience of purchasing the book. show less

Sergio Chejfec writes:

So I began to think about how long I’ve been taking walks. Years, decades. And if I live significantly longer I could keep on adding, because one thing I’m sure of is that I’ll never stop. But despite this great amount of walking, however, no walk has provided me with any genuine revelation. In my case it’s not as it was in the past, when walkers felt reunited with something that was revealed only during the course of the walk, or believed they had discovered show more aspects of the world or relationships within nature that had been hidden until then. I never discovered anything, only a vague idea of what was new and different, and rather fleeting at that. I now think I went on walks to experience a specific type of anxiety, one that I’ll call nostalgic anxiety, or empty nostalgia. Nostalgic anxiety would be a state of deprivation in which one has no chance for genuine nostalgia. There may be various reasons for the block. If I’m going to explain it, I have to tell the story of my borrowed ideas, which I’m full of – I say “borrowed,” but I’m not suggesting I don’t have full rights to them, on the contrary…

One of these ideas, among the first I assimilated so thoroughly as to make it my own, was the idealization, initially during the Romantic Era, then the Modern, of the long walk. There must have been something wrong with me, because at the point at which I should have chosen a way of life for my future, I found nothing persuasive. From early on I’ve felt unequal to any kind of enthusiasm: incapable of believing in almost anything, or frankly, in anything at all; disappointed beforehand by politics; skeptical of youth culture despite being, at the time, young; an idle spectator at the collective race for money and so-called material success; suspicious of the benevolence of charity and self-improvement; oblivious of the benefits of procreation and the possibilities of biological continuity; oblivious as well of the idea of following sports or any variety of spectacle; unable to work up enthusiasm for any impracticable profession or scientific vocation; inept at arts or at crafts, at physical or manual labor, also intellectual; to sum up, useless for work in general; unfit for dreaming; with no belief in any religious alternative while longing to be initiated into that realm; too shy or incompetent for an enthusiastic sex life; in short, given such failings, I had no other choice but to walk, which most resembled the vacant and available mind. show less

This work by Chejfec was a fascinating character sketch absolutely devoid of plot. The genius of it lay with its ability to reveal the narrator ever so gradually, to create a multi-dimensional view of him from one of the most talented and intimate first person points of view I have ever read. The scenes rippled back and forth through time, yet there was no confusion of the order of events, because there were no events. Chejfec used digital imagery to good effect here, and portrayed the show more combination of a walking habit, thoughtful personality, and varied life with a striking vividness. show less

Sergio Chejfec writes:

My conversations with others were becoming more and more infrequent, in a rapid and apparently uncheckable decline. I found nothing to say, hardly ever, and what I heard always seemed insufficient to me. On the one hand, my experience was increasingly limited, I devoted ever longer periods just to thinking, to scattered, free floating lucubrations that were remote from any aim or focus; and on the other hand, I realized that every day I was more indecisive in my show more assertions, so much so that I made distorted, untenable or downright unconvincing comments, and anyhow that didn't matter to me because I thought that the truth - whatever this was - as pertaining to me would be found in the depths (not inner depths, something I obviously couldn't believe in and that perhaps no longer existed, but rather, in the depth of things, that is, in the punitive ultimate meaning of my words.) I was ruminating on these ideas among those dark roads, noticing how mute, blackened nature was in harmony with my thoughts and provided a backdrop for them. I imagined that those valleys with their hidden population were the only territory in the world I was fated to live in; that I spoke with the intention of making myself heard, but in a displaced language, neither incorrect nor foreign, only distorted by the conditions of the milieu, as if my voice were broadcasting at a supernatural frequency; thus not only language separated me from everything, also spatial coordinates, the ever more restricted physical world, etc. At my age, I thought in the midst of the dark mountain, at my age I'm whining like a lonely little boy, etc. show less