Toronto, Canada;
1952

A friend called to say I was on TV. It turned out to be a rerun from last year's series. I've always found it painful, sometimes impossible, to watch or listen to myself, but I forced myself to do so this time because the whole show seemed so alien. It had nothing to do with the way I feel about myself. It was like reading an article with my name on it which some unknown editor had changed out of all recognition.

While I was watching, the phone rang again. The caller identified himself as a radio ham operator, at that moment on the air with a radio ham in Baffinland. Eskimo friends of mine had traveled to a weather station to talk to me. My conversation with them was made all the more remarkable by the visual background on TV.

As a boy I spent my summers beside a lake in the company of many cousins. Around 1930, an uncle set up a movie camera on a tripod, pointing it through the trees, past the shore, toward a distant island, and filmed a group of us playing. Years later he set up a projector where the tripod had stood so that on the screen we saw exactly what we would have seen had it been daylight, save for one difference: everyone was twenty years older & several were dead.

We live in different communities of time, different personalities of time. The electronic world isn't the tribal world of interpenetrating space & all-contemporaneous time, but one of many times going on at once: the world of Magritte & Ernst.

Postscript: On November 30, 1971, five bandits approached a New York bank. The two lead bandits, with shotguns, blasted out the glass doors. Most of the people inside threw themselves on the floor, where the other bandits sprayed them with automatic weapons, wounding twelve.

"Teller Fannie Pandiella raced to an upstairs ladies' room.

"'One of the robbers chased me,' she said excitedly. 'But when I ran into the ladies' room he stopped and shouted for me to come out. I didn't, so he went away.'"

New York Post, November 30, 1971