Artificial Interruption
by Alexander Urbelis (alex@urbel.is)
Disconnection as Being
For those not familiar with the concept of the Proustian moment, according to the American Psychological Association, it is "The sudden, involuntary evocation of an autobiographical memory, including a range of related sensory and emotional expressions." The term comes from Marcel Proust, a 19th Century French novelist and critic. In Proust's most famous work, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, (translated as Remembrance of Things Past), at the outset, Proust's protagonist eats a tea-soaked madeleine cookie. The smell and taste of the madeleine evoke strong memories from his childhood of him doing the very same thing with his aunt. From taste and scent of this buttery morsel doused with lime-blossom tea, long-forgotten memories come back vigorously and vivaciously, giving the protagonist the ability to recall details buried within his mind, the minutiae of his home, the streets on which he used to play as a child, his town square... many memories that were lost in time came back into being.
I had a Proustian moment of sorts last week. What evoked my involuntary memory, however, had nothing to do with French pastries but was an older Richard Linklater movie, Before Sunrise, set in Vienna in the 1990s. I had both a flood of memories and a yearning for a time where, despite being disconnected, perhaps we were more connected to each other and the moment.
My Vienna story is from the spring of 1998, and, like the plot of Before Sunrise, also involved trains, chance meetings, and the limitations of 1990s technologies.
I'd taken an overnight train from Venice to Vienna. Living and studying in England at the time, I was traveling with a girl from Oxford who was, for that moment at least, my girlfriend. I don't recall very much at all of the Vienna train station, except for the money-changing kiosks in the terminal.
Hardly uncommon for 19-year-olds, I'll freely admit that I had a wandering eye. While my girlfriend was waiting in the queue to change U.S. dollars into Austrian schillings (remember, this was several years before the Euro, when each European country had its own, unique currency), I locked eyes with a gorgeous girl, waiting on the same kiosk, one place ahead. Shortish brown hair that was angularly just below jaw level, she had a look that was distinctly American. Accompanied by an older gentleman who sounded like he spoke German well, I wasn't sure if she was with her father or an older boyfriend. Furtively, we glanced back-and-forth at each, but nothing came of this. How could it? My girlfriend was right next to her.
That evening, the girlfriend and I were walking along a back street looking for a place to eat that wasn't touristy or obscenely expensive. Coming straight at me, on the very same sidewalk, was the girl from the train station. I couldn't let us pass like ships in the night so I pointed at her and said "train station," as she passed. We both looked behind us, me as I continued walking backwards and pointing at her. "Wow," was all she said as she smiled and continued on her way. What a weird coincidence, I thought to myself.
The girlfriend and I stayed in a little pensione outside of the city center, well off the beaten path. This was primarily to save money because we were taking the Eurail around for several weeks and still had a way to go. It was the sort of place that backpackers and students would frequent and I recall a strange, outdated, greenish theme running throughout all the rooms, matching the equally dated linoleum floors.
The night passed. We took breakfast in the pensione: a coffee and some fresh breads. As I was walking back to our table, I saw the girl again, sitting right there diagonally across. "Hello again. This is weird," I said. We all started talking. The girl informed both my girlfriend and me that she was a student from Arkansas and that she was traveling with her father. There was a connection between the two of us for sure. We commented on how uncanny it was to run into each other three times in a single day in Vienna, and especially so in the odd little pensione we found ourselves. We exchanged no details for staying in touch. We departed.
The girlfriend and I went on our way, westward, to Germany. Train to Munich, then to Frankfurt, then to visit some friends in Heidelberg. Everything was great. I sometimes thought of the girl from Vienna, but that was long gone by now and a few weeks past.
We eventually went back to England. The girlfriend eventually went back to the United States. We stayed together doing the long distance thing for perhaps a month, but eventually broke up.
The night after this breakup, I decide to go to the Oxford Union to listen to, if memory serves me right, Aleksander Kwaśniewski, the then-President of Poland address the student body. After events such as this, the custom is to rush to the bar to grab a few Union-subsidized pints.
There was a massive influx at the bar. Though I remember nothing of what Kwaśniewski said, I do recall quite vividly that I was ordering a cheap pint of Tetley's when I looked over to my right and immediately standing next to me was the girl from Vienna. "What're you doing here?" I asked. After a brief moment of disbelief, she screamed and hugged me and asked me the same thing. It turned out that both she and I had been living in Oxford the entire year and never saw each other. What are the chances? It must be fate, we both thought. We exchanged phone numbers. We made plans for drinks. We were both excited.
I apologize for the anti-climax here, but nothing ever happened. The girl from Vienna had an overbearing boyfriend very skeptical of our Viennese connection. Like the girlfriend I had when I met the girl in Vienna, she too eventually went back to the United States. I had only her local phone number in Oxford and, after she left, we never spoke again.
All of these memories, the glances, the chance meetings, the slant of light on the street the evening we passed each other, that intense feeling of recognition when I saw the girl from Vienna next to me at the bar several countries away - they all came flooding back when I was re-watching Before Sunrise, a story of two travelers and their chance meeting on a train.
In the movie, Ethan Hawke plays Jesse, an American student, who meets Céline, a French student played by Julie Delpy, on a train en route to Vienna. An awkward fight between a married couple in their train car gives them cause to catch glances and, in due course, speak to each other. There's flirting and a connection, and they decide that they will disembark in Vienna together to wander the city. Unlike my anti-climactic story, Jessie and Céline have an engaging evening of conversation, self-discovery, and climactic sex in a park. They decide that their meeting and encounter was meaningful but decidedly fleeting, and they agree to part ways forever the following day. As they are saying their goodbyes, which proved more difficult than anticipated, Jessie and Céline agree not to exchange any contact details, but to meet in that same spot six months later. The movie ends while we watch them separately journey onwards towards home, alone, and we wonder whether they will make good on their promise of reunion.
Though there are trains and Vienna and chance encounters in common between my story and the plot of Before Sunrise, those details were not the sole reason why I had the Proustian moment that I did. As I watched Jessie and Céline, I remembered what impermanence felt like and recalled how short-lived and fleeting life's encounters were. Before the days of relentless social networking, we often met people and then said goodbye, forever.
It may be difficult for young readers today to understand that a goodbye at a train station was the end of a relationship. Today, every chance encounter is followed up by a LinkedIn request, inextricably connecting you to all of your acquaintances forever. Today, Jessie and Céline would surely have followed each other on Instagram. In the early-1990s, there was no LinkedIn, no exchanging of Instagram profiles, no Facebook friend requests, and barely any email.
Even email was ephemeral. Students often had university email addresses, but those were never permanent. Email permanence is a function of services like Hotmail and Gmail, with which we struck a dubious bargain: an email address forever in exchange for the right to datamine our communications.
With our identities attached to every encounter, to our locations, and to every interaction, there is an ever-increasing feeling of responsibility and accountability for everything we do, and this, in turn, leads to a sense of permanence of self from which it has become impossible to escape. It has, in other words, become impossible to stop being you.
This, however, leads to an ironical conundrum. Because we are stuck being ourselves, all the time, forever, that permanence prevents us from truly being and knowing ourselves. We cannot experiment, explore, or extricate ourselves from our online identities, and the full measure of data that represents our past actions and present identities. It is the very interconnectedness of the world, and the permanence and accountability that goes with it, that is holding us back rather than propelling us forward.
Perhaps that is because the permanent bonds and connections we make via social media are cheap and common. They are not meaningful. And the ease with which we connect, and stay connected with others, denigrates the value of all of our other relationships.
What would become of the encounter with the girl in Vienna today, or the chance meeting that set the stage for Before Sunrise? I would have connected with her on Facebook, browsed her pictures, realized she was at Oxford, and that lasting and inimitable feeling of recognition when seeing her at Oxford Union would have never happened. Jessie and Céline probably would have never locked eyes on that train to Vienna because they would have been staring at their phones.
The Proustian moment I had while watching Before Sunrise was in some sense a remembrance of the freedom that came from living in a disconnected world; it was at once a recognition of my fortuity to have matured in an age where I was not accountable for my every second of being, and of the tragedy that my children and their children will never know that feeling.
With this sense of self and being in mind, I do not think it is hyperbolic to state that the Internet has not only failed us, but in some ways has also broken us. If we are to recapture the beauty of the fleeting moment, the chance connection, the sense of uncertainty of ever meeting again, we need to fight for unaccountability, for anonymity, for privacy. The fight is not about data - it's about concepts more fundamental, powerful, and beautiful: about experiencing life, not as a profile or a data set, but as a human being.