I won't pretend I don’t have great aspirations. There’s this instinctive reflectivity away from desiring in the arts and literature. It’s uncouth, uncomfortable, to have great expectations for yourself. I want to be a great writer, yes, but I also want to be a highly regarded writer. It’s taken me longer than I’d like to admit that even to myself. One learns to content themselves with little lies that keep them safe from failure.
In 2022, I picked a piece of paper off the floor and stood up into an open cabinet door. The concussion that followed took 12 months to resolve. I couldn’t read for more than 5 minutes before a headache—one that felt like ram’s horns boring out of my skull—would cripple me. The coordination required to fold laundry was so cognitively exhausting that I’d need to nap after. I couldn’t write for a year. The world developed a film over it. There was nothing geometrically wrong with my vision, but something had gone out of the world–or me. The clinical term is derealization.
When the world finally began cohering again, the first thing I read was Time Gifts, an 80-page novel by the Serbian author Zoran Zivkovic, published in 1997 and translated into English in 2000.
The slim novel is a collection of 4 stories connected by a mysterious figure who offers the protagonist of each tale a gift taking the form of a journey through time. What sounds like a simple setup for a Faustian bargain, or perhaps a monkey’s paw literalism trap, in Zivkovic’s hands takes a far more complex and interesting shape.
In the first of the 4 stories, this stranger enters a religious prison, where a royal astronomer is awaiting execution. He’s posited theories of the cosmos that contradict the church, and so, a heretic, he’s been sentenced to death. Alone in a dank cell, he’s approach by a stranger dressed as a priest, but self-evidently something else, “a tempter.” The man gently chides the monk turned astronomer for accepting his pyre-bound fate, to which the astronomer responds that he “had no choice.”
Not so, the tempter tells him. For all he has to do is simply renounce his findings, and the church will spare him. The astronomer exclaims that he could not, in good conscience, disavow his science. He had discovered a fact. He would not renounce truth, lest it be taken from the world. We should all be so brave. Right?
The tempter, and this is, perhaps, him at his most devilish in the entire novel, spends the next twenty pages slowly dissecting the man’s true motivations.
The tempter, circuitously (as is the way of tempters), begins to suggest that the man has no real interest in his astrological truth. First, he claims that since the astronomer has already spoken the truth, even a renunciation could not undo it.
“The damage was done the moment you announced your discovery, and it cannot be undone. The fluttering of the butterfly’s wings should have been prevented before it initiated the storm. Even if the church made a sincere ally out of you, it would only slow down the harmful effects.”
This proclamation means little to the astronomer—and this is the crucial bit we find out later—even he believed that was true.
But how can the tempter prove his claim? Here, the first of his four time gifts is given. Using a mysterious watch, he throws the man forward centuries into the future, where the astronomer discovers that the very prison where he is being held has been tranformed into an observatory. The seat of his suffering becomes a beacon of scientific knowledge. What’s more, the tempter reveals with devilish glee, it will be named after the astronomer. There is some skepticism the astronomer has at first, whether or not the tempter is showing him the truth, but the story makes it clear to both him and the reader: this future is real.
Here, straightforwardly, is a gift. The man now knows, without a doubt, that his sacrifice for truth will matter. He will not only be vindicated, but the strength of his conviction literally transforms a building of orthodoxy into a vehicle of scientific discovery. Remarkable!
But of course, he would not be a tempter if this were a pure gift. There’s a wrinkle. There always is. The tempter’s watch throws the man back to his time—in, it should be noted, a dizzing passage of prose in which the “stars began to flow over all the edges as through the telescope were rushing through the air at an unbelievable speed, although it was resting immobile. It penetrated more and more into the dark expanse, reaching for unattainable infinity.” Back in his prison cell, the tempter tells him one final truth: if he recants, the observatory still arrives, no later, no different. Science marches on. His discovery marches on. There is only one, small, tiny, really microscopic change. If he recants, it will not be named after him. Instead, it will be named after “[o]ne of your students. . . who will be braver than you.”
The truth is that the naming of the observatory is due both to his discovery and his sacrifice. He cannot live past himself—through legacy—without dying horribly.
Here, the tempter’s true mission is laid bare. Each gift is less a gift than an experiment asking: What do you really want? If the astronomer cares more about scientific truth than anything else, he has just learned he does not have to sacrifice his life to accomplish this. He’s already advanced science. He’s already ensured the future will be a star-knowing, not just star-gazing, one. His death is only relevant for his posterity.
The tempter’s gift is the stripping away of all pretense and allowing his receivers to live in the consequences of their actions. The characters don’t have to guess, as we all must, at the nuances and effects of their decisions. There is none of the usual attendant ambiguity of our lives. Stripped of this ambiguity, only true desires remain. These, a reader might begin to suspect, are tales that challenge stated versus revealed preferences. The tempter is constructing the conditions under which people’s true preferences (the ones that emerge from actual decisions) can be rendered clear.
The astronomer is given one final chance to repent after all of this. Knowing now that his death only matters in one way—that his sacrifice will not be for science, will not be a harm against the church, will not change anything other than how (or whether) history memorializes him.
Here, Zivkovic makes a choice that will either delight or anger most readers, depending on their proclivities. The story ends with the moment of self-truth. The inquisitors (not the tempter) ask him whether or not he will recant.
“And then, finally, the royal astronomer slowly turned toward the inquisitors and gave his monosyllabic answer.”
Each time I read this first story, I feel differently about this ending. Unlike our astronomer, we don’t get to know whether he chooses his life or his legacy. We don’t get to know the answer. Both yes and no are monosyllables, of course. I find this kind of ambiguity in writing powerful. It encourages one to mine the previous 20 pages for psychological insight into the character, and these rereadings are rewarding because the writing is crisp, clear, lyrical, and philosophically fascinating. Still, I admit to chafing against the ambiguity myself sometimes. I wonder if that’s the point.
What the tempter exposes, beneath all the theological theater, is the gap between what the astronomer says he values and what he will really do given the chance to live. It is only by inhabiting the choice that his true preference, his desire, is revealed. But there is a gap there. The not-knowing is a signal of what the real work of the novel builds towards. The actual decision, the reveal, is obscured because the stranger doesn’t care about revealed preferences—the choice—he cares about the insoluble sensations and feelings that come before and after.
It came to me in a dream two months before my concussion—and if it’s good enough for Kekulé, then it’s good enough for me. It, being him: handsome, made handsomer by his knowledge of this handsomeness, smooth talking, tastefully moustached, and well dressed: the tempter. We sat on a bench before a placid lake that stretched out forever.
“Do you want to be great?” he asked. “Do you want everything you say you do?”
“Yes,” I answered.
The second story in this book is, taken in isolation, one of the best speculative stories I’ve ever read. It’s the reason I’m writing this review, really, so hopefully there are a couple more people I can talk to about it.
Now centuries later, in something approximating the modern university, a beleaguered paleolinguist (a woman who studies and researches the primeval genesis of language) nears retirement by rotely moving through her stifled life. She reads in a tiny office obscured from the sun, often falling asleep on her desk out of a strange combination of malaise and boredom. These naps distress her because she is “an embarrassment to herself.” In this anhedonia, the tempter knocks on her door.
He smooth-talks his way into her office by complimenting her work. She is incredulous at the fact that she has a reader, let alone a fan, but often incredulity is the first step towards bashfulness, and for her it is. Despite her pride, she cannot help but self-efface. She kindly tells the tempter he’d be better served by developing an interest other than her work and paleolinguistics as a whole.
Here, he asks another piercing question: “Do you think you squandered your life?”
Many of us move breezily through our days only by the good (or perhaps ruinously ill) fortune of not having anyone ask us this. In answer, she gestures at the office filled with books hardly anyone has read, answering questions hardly anyone has asked. “Everything would end up on the garbage heap after my death.”
She goes on to answer every gentle challenge the tempter makes. What about the fact that her work led to the founding of the paleolinguistics department? A worthless department that has never had more than 8 students at a time. Her books? Aforementioned garbage. The field itself? Here, she has even harsher words.
“Paleolinguistics is not an exact science. It cannot be, since, in the strictest sense of that term, the subject of study is missing. Primeval language has been dead for a very long time. We have no direct evidence of it. . . We try to recompose a mosaic whose original appearance is unknown, and we are not even certain that we are using the right stones.”
The metaphors Zivkovic’s characters and narrator wield are deeply striking, a feat made even more impressive by the fact that they have survived translation into English.
The tempter once again pushes, lightly, arguing that her work has convincingly shown that in ancient and even modern languages, traces of the primeval language have remained. Isn’t that a feat?
The true depth of her disillusionment is finally revealed.
“There is one person, however, whom I have never managed to completely convince of this. The only one I really care about.” That person, of course, is herself.
Here, the tempter has revealed her stated wish, her self-claimed central desire. All she cares about is knowing, with certainty, the truth. The devil may live in the details, but he deals in desire. The tempter offers her a gift. Of course, because “the devil is a sadist above all,” it is not a gift without consequence.
He offers to send her into the distant past, with two caveats. One, she would never be able to return. There would be no publishing of her results. Neither vindication nor rebuttal. No one but her would know. Two, she would forever experience this past the way you would a movie. “Imagine such a film about the past that would act upon all your senses, not just sight and hearing. A film in which you would feel exactly the same way you do in reality, except that you could not take part in it, change it.” She would “remain[] invisible and inaudible, unobserved. “Like a ghost,” she notes.
Unlike the astronomer, she never quite believes the tempter is capable of such gifts. The conversation ends, and the devil asks her for his watch—which he says he’s misplaced in her office. She finds it, and as she goes to return it to him, she is suddenly taken exactly where the devil offered. Phantasmic, she wanders a prehistoric past. Butterflies fly through her. She learns she can fly and does so. She becomes giddy, growing even giddier when she sees in the distance a small tribe of 12 prehistoric humans gathered around a fire. From a distance, their voices are muffled, and she pauses, savoring the last moments before she gets her answer.
This pause also gives her a chance to consider the aforementioned sadism the tempter promised. She cannot imagine that the only punishment is never returning home. What would wait for her back home? “Lonely drudgery in a dark basement? The humiliation brought by neglect and old age? The unremovable doubts that would maliciously follow her to the end? No, staying here would be a reward and not a punishment.”
There’s a beauty to this moment. How few of us ever get the chance to confront the truth of ourselves like this? To escape our reality and recognize that leaving it behind is no sacrifice at all? Her victory does not last long. The wind carries the smell of boiling water filled with dried herbs—tea!---one of her favorite corporeal experiences. A well of desire opens up in her, forever insatiable now, unable to feed her bodily desires ever again. This absence registers precisely as pain. A deep pain. She learns that it is not just the profundity of life that textures it. It is often the small, sensory moments that matter most.
She couldn’t have known any of this before. She had modeled this specific scenario for her entire career, and yet the subtlest of details—the smell of tea, the thirst for its earthy warmth—are what sting her most. She never modeled this. Prediction fails here. She, like all of us, is notoriously awful at forecasting our own emotional responses to outcomes we haven’t lived. Affective forecasting, as psychologists Gilbert and Wilson would call it, is hard. We’re often overselling how long something wonderful will content us and how long something horrible will sadden us. Zivkovic’s work is making these tiny failures of prediction visible and dramatic. We are always failing to know what makes us happy. Zivkovic’s paleolinguist is no exception.
The rationale of the astronomer’s decisional lacunae crystallizes here. The decision isn’t the important part. The consequences can only be lived through.
Her despair only lasts so long before she bravely sets it aside. That door is forever closed. “All that was left was to take what was hers in return.” Again, Zivkovic leaves us just a breath before we’d like him to. She floats toward the fire “to meet the voices of the primeval language that would tell her the simple truth.”
Some might object that always leaving the reader in the moment before the truth amounts to a kind of artistic dereliction of duty, or at least a cowardice or lack of resolve. I disagree. Time Gifts is not a novel about answers. It is a novel about desire and desire exists precisely until the moment it’s fulfilled. Each story ends when the tension and shape of that desire have been brought into view. The void each story leaves echoes the void that sits at the heart of our desires. This, perhaps, is the true sadism of the novel’s tempter. It is not the monkey’s paw punishments that accompany the gifts, but the lived-in realities of the gifts themselves. The way they lay bare the confused hearts of our desires. Do we want the world changed, or do we want to change the world? Do we actually value knowledge over everything the body gives us? If we knew the astronomer's answer, the tension would give out. If we knew whether the paleolinguist’s theories were vindicated, catharsis would overcome absence. So we leave our paleolinguist at the precipice of discovery.
“I can give it all to you,” the stranger said to me. It was a dream, maybe, but what did that matter?
“Then do,” I said.
That haughty tsking of one who knows they’re better than you felt like sandpaper in my ears.
“It’s not so simple. There’ll be a cost. Let me first tell you what you stand to gain. You will be rich, of course, and famous. Your books will be loved by audiences and read seriously by critics. Even those who write screeds against you will acknowledge your craft and skill. You will travel the world, speak inside of filled lecture halls, be interviewed by beautiful and brilliant people. You will have fans. Your writing will be taught in classrooms and passages read at weddings and funerals. You will want for nothing. It will all be given to you by your writing.”
“But?” There is always a but.
“You will have to leave your loved ones behind. Your wife will leave you—your best friend and your aunts and uncles and your older cousins and your sister and your parents—you will have to take everything that you give them, and give it to your art instead. And so they will leave. The root-thick mesh that ties you to them will rot and wither and dissolve in the ocean of your success. It won’t be like magic. It will be a deal. You will give everything to this one thing, you will lose everything else, and I will, the world will give you exactly what you desire.”
I woke before I could answer.
The penultimate story in Time Gifts is the novel’s most devastating and some of the novel’s most philosophically ambitious writing.
A watchmaker sits alone in his shop until a mysterious stranger with an old watch enters his store. There’s a not-so-subtle ennui that hangs miasmic around the watchmaker. His daily life seems to be filled with emptiness. The stranger shatters his usual evening habits of “taking the short walk along the most often empty street to the small, excessively neat attic apartment where no one waited for him, preparing a mostly tasteless meal.”
This is one of the most explicitly philosophical sections of the story, but in a way that (now) feels somewhat shallower than it was the first time I read this novel. The stranger speaks about time as branches on a tree rather than a straight river.
“What if there were not just one time flow, one inscription in granite? If there were several flows—countless, actually? Imagine time not as a single river but as an enormous tree with countless branches, countless forks.”
It’s a pretty image, almost Yggdrasilic, but it doesn’t do much for me as an insightful model of time. Thankfully, the story doesn’t linger on this reflection. The imagery and metaphor permeate the rest of the story, but the substance beneath the metaphor far outweighs the limited success of the actual imagery..
The stranger throws the man backward in time shortly after their brief, befuddling conversation. In this alternate branch, if we take the stranger’s conception of time to be true, we meet the watchmaker’s former wife: “a whirlwind of blond curls, her long rustling dress, her smile so enchanting.” In the hazy joy of seeing her, the watchmaker slowly realizes the precise moment to which he’s been thrown. He realizes with horror, before we, the reader, understand what his gift entails.
“The sequence of events stood before him, completely clear. . . the wild music of the horse bells. . . her hurried departure onto the pavement in front of the shop as the empty carriage wildly jumped on the cobblestones. . . the horrible shock at realizing there was no way to make an escape. . . a yellow hat with a large brim and a wide ribbon tied to the bow. . . a pile of silk undergarments that certainly should not have been displayed like this—the senseless nakedness of death.”
He remembers all this in the same instant it unfolds. Only this time, he knows what waits for Mary as she exits the door. He shouts her name, and she lingers in the doorway, rather than walking into the street.
“He had to overcome the violent river to utter this word, to scrape off the previous deposit on the palimpsest with his nails, to seize hammer and chisel to write a new inscription on the virgin surface of the granite.”
It works. Miracle of all miracles, it works. She stops in the doorway, and the carriage crashes farther down the block. He’s done it. He’s entered a new branch. One where Mary lives. Joy balloons in his chest. He holds her tightly, and she obliges him, a touch confused as to why he is so insistent on holding her. They talk about the ruckus caused by the crashing carriage, and in their conversation a horror—a sadness—-settles over the watchmaker.
Mary, this Mary, is alive. She was not hit by the carriage. And yet, the watchmaker knows that “[t]he inscription chiseled in granite could not be erased.” On another branch, his Mary, his Mary, was hit. She died. He watched her broken-hearted on the street corner and then lived many lonely years with only the memory of her akimbo corpse and the echo of her laughter haunting him. He remembers every second of the worst moment of his life. He did lose his wife. She did die. None of this gift undid any of that cruel reality. “That clarity; that hard certainty of memory, was the price he had to pay for this unique privilege.”
It might be easy to consider this watchmaker ungrateful, but I don’t think that’s right. There’s a beautiful, twisted lesson about joy buried in this story, one that’s more complicated than the simple “it is death which gives life meaning” pablum. His dour, shadowy grief, the book tells us, stays with him forever, ameliorated only occasionally by his wife’s “cheerfulness.”
The watchmaker’s gift nakedly exposes the failure of prediction. Our tendency to predict how a future outcome will feel is so often wrong in ways that only become clear once we're living it. One can only imagine the countless hours he spent wishing to undo his wife’s death. Once he does, though, he realizes that undoing a single action doesn’t undo the life he spent grieving, and the actuality of that original death. He doesn’t just want to undo it, he wants it to have never happened at all. But he can’t do that—and not just because that gift wasn’t on offer. He can’t do it because leaving behind the Mary who died would mean loving her less.
The nature of desire is even more squishy than revealed vs. stated preferences would suggest. The gifts the not-devil gives reveal the stickiness of affective forecasting. It is only through the embodied experience of living with an irreversible decision—to recant or die; to float as a ghost in the deep past; to save your wife who died decades ago—that these characters truly come to know what they actually like.
There were times after my concussion when I returned to the page and tried, desperately to type something. I mean this sincerely, sentences would not form. I couldn’t write without a pain that made everything but shutting my eyes and lying down intolerable. I thought, sometimes, in that frenetic desperation chronic illness and pain can engender, that maybe, somehow, I had answered that demon. That I’d said no, and as punishment, he’d taken everything away.
The day before the day before my wedding, my wife and I stayed down at her parents’ place—closer to the venue where we’d be married. She drove us down, but even still, the hour-and-a-half car ride had been hard. I mean this sincerely: my brain could not handle a field of vision that moved at more than 5mph. After we arrived, I crawled into her childhood bedroom and tried to sleep. The thing is, though, if you are essentially doing nothing all day because everything hurts, it’s really hard to sleep because you’re ruinously bored. I lay in the blackout-curtained bedroom, too-hot above the sheets (temperature regulation, it turns out, can be thrown out of whack by brain injury, too). So, I just lay there with my eyes closed for hours. I heard my soon-to-be-wife, my brother-and-sister-in-law, and their parents out in the garage. They’d moved the cars out to make room for a folding table and a chest cooler and were playing drinking games and laughing and sharing muffled stories and making memories I was too hurt and tired to participate in. I had to reserve all my cognitive strength for the wedding we had in two days. I cried, listening to their joy. I didn’t expect them not to have it. I didn’t want them to be miserable alongside me, but I felt this chasm between their laughter and my tears and I just couldn’t stop. It didn’t help, of course, that emotional disregulation is another common symptom of my post-concussive syndrome.
If there’s a horror in these gifts, it’s a horror that Zivkovic twists deeper in the final, metafictional, story of the novel.
The stranger enters the room of an institutionalized painter: a woman who has, apparently, been receiving regular visits from the tempter. The story begins with a conversation between the painter and one of her doctors, where they discuss the stranger. The doctor, of course, assumes him to be a manifestation of her mental illness, a hallucination. The painter believes she has discovered his true nature. He’s not a devil, she says, though his gifts are not gifts as we know them.
The stranger is the writer. The very writer of the book we’re reading.
The artist explains to the doctor that the writer has decided to stop giving out time gifts to his characters. He is too saddened by the suffering they cause. The pain hurts both them and him, she says, and he feels a heavy responsibility for his characters.
The doctor challenges this notion. They’re not real, after all, he says. The artist isn’t convinced.
When the doctor leaves, the artist returns to the work she has been painting: A picture of the stranger who has finally shown himself to her. So far the painting is unfinished, though she has his body strewn on a cross. She needs to finish the face. In the fervor of artistic creation, she does. She paints him with a face wracked with pain, “[a]nd at that moment she understood why the pain was necessary. Without it, he would only be an indifferent god who justified the harm he did with good intentions. . . The suffering he chose brought him redemptiom by making him identical to those he had transgressed.
In this image, she sees the writer and crystallizes his pain. The final time gift, if these gifts are a form of affective forecast prediction experiments, is not the painter’s but the writer's. After giving each of these people their gift, the complicated machinations of their true, unknowable desires emerged. Likewise, by limning their suffering into existence, his own desires manifest. His experiment is over. More pain would be superfluous. He doesn’t want to hurt people, even imaginary ones, anymore.
In the final moments of the story, the painter bids the writer adieu. “Goodbye, Z.” and the novel ends.
There’s a brutal honesty in the novel’s navel-gazing ending. The desire to consider the why of writing. The absence of the answer on the page. The writing of it anyway.
Two days after my teary, sleepless night, I got married. I was still concussed. I had to read my vows I’d promised to memorize off a piece of paper (and it hurt). It was one of the most beautiful days of my life. The sun shone too brightly, my father—the officiant—spoke just a little too long (it was perfect), my wife’s vows, which she’d finished in the limousine ride over to the venue, was the singularly best piece of writing I’d ever heard, I kissed her in front of everyone we liked and loved and they cheered, my best man gave a toast that people still tell me is the best they’ve heard, we danced the entire time. It was a moment of abundance, of feasting. I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.
There it was. My answer: I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. If that demon had offered to take both my concussion and my wedding away, I would say no. Perhaps I’m not as committed an artist as Zivkovic. His characters never get to file their report. They are left at the precipice, desire clarified but the answer withheld. I can’t resist providing an answer. But I’m not a character. I had to live through it—the pain, the physical therapy, the consequences. When I had, I knew.
If I couldn’t smile in a room surrounded by people who loved me for a thousand things that had nothing to do with my writing, then what on Earth would there be left to write about?