A smile, recited

Reading book two of the Life of Rancé in the bath this evening, with quiet joy I recognized a small sentence that Roland Barthes once cited in his essay on Chateaubriand’s last book. Some months previously I had read Barthes’beautiful preface with such attentive enthusiasm that although I had no overt interest in Rancé, I was easily convinced to read the 1844 biography of the Baroque abbott, more precisely Chateaubriand’s last meditation on mortality and time, written as a penitence requested by his confessor just four years before the writer’s 1848 death. “Je ne suis plus que le temps” Barthes had cited, and feeling then a fascinated little pang, I transcribed the tiny fragment into my notebook. Now I fell upon it its earlier setting, and laying back in the water I translated it extemporaneously as “I am nothing but time” though “no more than time” is perhaps more correct—I am no more than time—I am nothing other than time—I am not other than time— so many tiny variations were possible, each feeling entirely true and fresh if not semiotically precise as the warm water relaxed my muscles. I enjoy the truth of imprecision. In Chateaubriand’s Life of Rancé the little sentence is a parenthetical aside, which serves as a rhetorical interruption in the midst of what is already an auto-quotation of an earlier exclamation Chateaubriand reputedly made to the ghost of the guillotined Queen Marie Antoinette as he recognized the characteristic smile on her disinterred skull. “I cite myself (I am only time)” he wrote, and now it seems to me that ‘temps,’ time, could also refer to verb tense— I am nothing but the tense of the verb—the time of the sentence, or tense. In any case that’s six generations of time carried in one tiny sentence all comingling for an instant in my bath: the time of the Queen’s grin, the time of her exhumation, the time of Chateaubriand’s recollection and citation of the sentence, the time of its recitation in the account of the Abbott, the time of my first reading of the sentence in Barthes, and the time of its appearance in my reading of the Life of Rancé.