We each have our own private reality. Here the poet hesitates between the past, already unreal, and the future, soon to vanish too.

Midpoint
by Charles Simic
(Looking for Trouble, Faber & Faber)

No sooner had I left A.
Than I started doubting its existence:
Its streets and noisy crowds;
Its famous all-night cafés and prisons.

It was dinnertime. The bakeries were closing:
Their shelves empty and white with flour.
The grocers were lowering their iron-grilles.
A lovely young woman was buying the last casaba melon.

Even the back alley where I was born
Blurs, dims . . . O rooftops!
Armadas of bedsheets and shirts
In the blustery, crimson dusk . . .

B. at which I am destined
To arrive by and by
Doesn’t exist now. Hurriedly
They’re building it for my arrival,
And on that day it will be ready:

Its streets and noisy crowds . . .
Even the schoolhouse where I first
Forged my father’s signature . . .

Knowing that on the day
Of my departure
It will vanish forever
Just as A. did.

For each of us, most of the time, our world is the only world that exists, and that is why I chose this poem: it distils that thought perfectly.

It begins when we are very small children and our home is our world, because, most of the time, it is all that we see. We learn the immediacy of our surroundings and the sensations and noises that accompany them. Nothing outside the here and now exists for us because, in our earliest years, we have no reason to know anything else. And our parents are the gods who rule our entire universe. Their every scowl or shout or kiss or hug completely fills our world in that second of its delivery. But the time they spend with us is the only time we know that they are truly alive. When a parent leaves the house the idea of them is suspended in our minds until their return. And so it is with friends and relatives as we grow older, and with husbands, wives and places.

When we leave a place it ceases to exist in reality for us because we cannot see it. We have only our memory of it. And it is only our memory; anyone else’s memory of that place will be quite different. We cannot imagine how it will change without us being there, so we do not do so. We are not there to witness the happenings that would then disturb our frozen image of a place any more than we are able to witness the blessings and catastrophes that affect the people in it after we have gone.

“No sooner had I left A./ Than I started doubting its existence” the poet writes. Not only does the place cease to exist in reality for him, but now he is wondering if it was ever there at all. He recalls “Its streets and noisy crowds”, but the farther he travels from it, the more time passes, and, since the place is now held only in his memory, any recollection of it might be open to conjecture and error. So he reminds himself of the things he has seen; the bakers and grocers closing up their shops for the evening, and the “lovely young woman” who was “buying the last casaba melon”. He cements those memories by writing them into the poem, but as memories they record only what he saw at the point when he left. After that, he does not know what happens to the shops and the shopkeepers; whether they open up again the following day or if, indeed, there is a day that follows. He has no idea whether the “lovely young woman” eats the melon or not; life in A. has ceased for him.

But I believe the poet is doing more than simply writing about the imagined instance of A. vanishing when he is not actually in it (as if it were one of our rural post offices). I think he is basing his poem on the idea that a place really does cease to exist the moment he leaves it, because it continues to evolve beyond his last memory of it; it becomes a different place. His memory of A. is no longer true a second, a minute or an hour after he has gone. Everyone who lives and breathes in that place undergoes an infinitesimal change during that first second, which escalates alarmingly as time passes, and this evolution does not include him.

The truth of a place, a person or incident is relative only to the past — the past being A., as in somewhere we’ve been — because it was quantifiable at a given moment. The future hasn’t been made yet, just like the poet’s destination, B.

In the present (the millisecond when future becomes past), life lived by anyone else is only real and tangible to us if it spins into our orbit. Those who live in the country full time do not think of city dwellers in real terms, only in the abstract, and so it is for city dwellers; those of us in the country are only a concept in their imaginations, who live somewhere that is full of imaginary greenery. MPs are notorious for this, being generally city-bound. The idea of the “ countryside” seems to become, in their minds, just an airport-runway-to-be expanse of inconvenient hilly bits between A. and B.

Our minds, and the way in which we accommodate our idea of people, places and relationships, create the intellectual and emotional environment that each of us imposes upon our physical environment — but only the physical environment that we occupy at any given moment. Since it is not humanly possible to be aware of all places at all times, anywhere we are not must cease to exist for us when we are not looking, even if it is currently in existence for the man or woman farther down the street. And if they should, in walking past you, crash shoulders, their world and yours will meet for that one moment. Then you pass on and he or she takes their reality with them, and you take yours, knowing that the building of the side street as you turn the corner will be completed just in time.

frieda.hughes@thetimes.co.uk

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