September 12, 1926

The party was a success. By which I mean that twelve people arrived, five of them slightly intoxicated, and one—Miss Pembroke—arrived precisely at 9:00 PM and asked immediately if there would be music. There was. I had hired a pianist from the Palm Court. She played Gershwin. She played it well. I watched her from the doorway, a glass of something amber in my hand, and felt the peculiar sensation of being both inside the moment and outside it, observing myself observing the moment.

This is what I have come to understand about myself: I am a perpetual outsider at my own life.

***

September 28, 1926

Catherine came to the party. She wore a dress the color of midnight and a hat that was, I believe, illegal in three states. She danced. She did not drink. She watched me drink.

"You're trying to do something," she said, when the pianist took a break and the room filled with the sound of people being pleasant to one another.

"Doing what?"

"Hosting. But not just hosting. You're hosting a version of a party that existed in a specific year, and you're trying to make this party exist in that year instead of this one."

I set my glass down. "How did you—"

"Your library. Every book published before 1920. Your gramophone records. The clothes you're wearing are from a dead style. The gin is imported from a company that closed in 1919."

"I am Curator Ashworth of the Ashworth Historical Collection—"

"You're a man who is trying to reverse time," she said. "And you're terrible at it because you're doing it wrong."

"I haven't asked you how you—"

"I'm a painter. I paint things as they are. You're asking me to paint them as they were. I can't do that. It's not painting. It's archaeology. And you're not an archaeologist. You're a guest at your own museum."

She left at 11:47 PM. I did not see her out.

***

October 15, 1926

I have assembled a room. Not a room—a collection. Every object in it was manufactured before 1914. The furniture, the books, the photographs, the gramophone, the silver candlesticks, the crystal decanters, the fountain pens with nibs ground to a specific point by a craftsman in Sheffield who is now dead.

I sit in this room and I read books that were printed on paper made from rags. I write with a pen that requires dipping. I listen to recordings that crackle.

I am trying to prove something to myself. That the past was not only real but superior. That the present is a degradation. That if I can construct a sufficiently authentic past, I can convince time itself to flow backward.

This is madness. I know it is madness. But it is a well-documented, well-furnished, intellectually defensible madness.

***

November 3, 1926

Catherine came again. She brought a canvas and sat in the corner of the historical room and painted while I paced and talked and tried to explain why the world had gotten worse.

"It hasn't," she said. "People are healthier. They travel faster. They have radio. They can hear voices from across the ocean. Women can vote. The world has gotten better."

"That's not true," I said. "People are louder. They're cruder. They don't understand beauty. They don't understand—anything. They've traded depth for speed."

"You're describing every generation's view of every subsequent generation," she said. "You're not unique. You're a statistical inevitability."

"Perhaps," I said. "But I am a well-dressed statistical inevitability."

She smiled. It was the first time I had seen her smile at something I had said.

***

December 20, 1926

The party was larger this time. Twenty people. More music. More gin. More of that peculiar American enthusiasm that mistakes volume for joy.

Catherine did not come. I understood why. She had told me, flatly, that she would not attend another party dedicated to a period she had never lived in.

"It's pathetic," she had said. "Not dangerous. Not destructive. Just pathetic. And you're the pathetic one. Not the guests. They're having a nice time. You're the one who thinks this means something."

She was right. Of course she was right. But I understood the difference between knowing something and feeling something. I knew the parties meant nothing. I felt something every time the gramophone crackled and the past bled through the needle's path.

***

January 18, 1927

I received a letter from Catherine. She was going to Paris. She had been accepted into an atelier near Montparnasse. She was leaving on the 25th.

She wrote: "You should come with me. Not to the party. To Paris. You are 28 years old. You have money. You have taste. You are drowning in the past. Come to a city that is making the future."

I did not answer. I could not. Not because I did not want to, but because the answer would have required me to admit that I was afraid. Afraid of the future. Afraid of change. Afraid of a world I could not curate.

***

February 14, 1927

The last party. I invited nobody. I set the table for one. I lit the candles. I played the gramophone. I wore the waistcoat.

I sat in the historical room and I ate dinner alone and I pretended, for exactly forty-seven minutes, that it was 1913 and that the world was about to change in a way that had nothing to do with me.

Then the record ended. The gramophone clicked. The needle reached the groove at the center and began to repeat. I got up, lifted the needle, and placed it back at the beginning.

It played the same notes. The same cracks. The same hiss.

I repeated this three times. Then I turned off the gramophone. The silence was absolute.

***

March 22, 1927

I sold the gramophone. It brought less than I expected. The buyer was a man who did not care about its provenance. He cared that it played.

I sold the crystal decanters. I kept the fountain pens. I cannot explain why.

Catherine left for Paris on the 25th. I did not see her off. I wrote a letter that I did not send. It read: "You were right about everything. The world has gotten better. I am not part of that improvement. I have chosen, deliberately and with full knowledge, to opt out. I do not know if this is courage or cowardice. I suspect cowardice. But it is a well-dressed cowardice."

***

April 8, 1927

I went to the library today. I walked past the section labeled 1920 and I stopped at the section labeled 1910. I pulled a book at random. It was a collection of poems by a man I had never heard of. I read three pages.

They were beautiful. They were about love and loss and the passage of time. They were not about trying to stop the passage of time.

I bought the book. I am reading it now, in the historical room, with the fountain pen, on paper that cost more than it should.

The gramophone is silent. The historical room is almost empty. The candles are gone.

I am reading a book about time passing.

I am, it seems, finally passing with it. --- ## 客观张量编码 (OTMES v2.0)

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