The novel A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki is my favorite piece of modern literature, as well as being a large part what inspired me to take this class and the reason behind the name of my blog.
The book opens:
Hi!
My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you.
A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or will ever be.
Nao is the sweet, eccentric, and struggling teen whose journal pages are used as every other chapter of the book. She shares the role of narrator with Ruth, a middle aged author living on an island in the pacific northwest. When Ruth finds Nao’s journal, presumably many years after its been written, the two begin a kind of conversation across space and time as they each explore in their own lives buddhist and french philosophy, japanese culture, quantum physics, and what lies ahead.
The journal that Nao is writing in, that serves as a bridge between the two narrators, is a “hacked” copy of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu. This means that someone had removed all the pages from Proust’s old book, and replaced them with blank journal pages, pages to be filled with the memories of young girl in Akiba Electricity Town, Japan. Although Proust is not discussed much directly, the themes in his novel are certainly present in A Tale for the Time Being, and reading about him briefly there was what sparked my interest to study his work.
When asked how Proust influenced the novel, Ozeki said:
Both Nao and Ruth are preoccupied with the past. Nao pines for her younger days in Sunnyvale. Ruth longs for her life in Manhattan and is trying (and failing) to write a memoir. They are stuck in the dream worlds of memory.
Proust was preoccupied with the passage of time and the evocative powers of memory. He coined the term “involuntary memory” to refer to a particular quality of remembrance, in which memory of the past arises unexpectedly, often triggered by some sensual experience, and is itself experienced sensually.
These are the waters that writers and readers spend their days paddling around in. We rely on our involuntary memory both to write and to read, because our memories of our lived experiences are what bring life to the words on the page, or in Proust’s case, many thousands of pages.
I think its amazing the way that authors can be in conversation with one another centuries apart, just as the two characters in Ozeki’s novel are. I am very much inspired by the work of both these great authors to write my own fiction and memoir pieces in which I bring my experiences to life, and with themes relatable enough to still be relevant in two hundred years.