Elsewhere On-Screen
I too decided to sit on one of those benches in that deserted spot in the park, trying to take stock of my life, which wasn't going well, for I too felt abandoned, alone, and unmoored in a world where neither the present nor the future held any promise for me. There was only the past, and now that I think of the night when I scoured the streets looking for an Upper West Side that might have felt more congenial, I realize that, like the Regency itself, like the Rialto of my childhood, that welcoming area of the city, with its strange accents, old shops and dingy bars, had been completely expunged. The Regency was gone in 1987, and the Rialto was brutally demolished in 2013. How could I belong there when I couldn't find a personal landmark anywhere except on the silver screen of a theater that itself would never achieve landmark status? Sometimes even the past, real or imagined, can be taken from us, and all we're left holding on a cold night in late fall is our raincoat.
And it hit me then that one of the reasons why some people cling to what has vintage status is not because they like things old or marginally dated, which allows them to feel that their personal time and vintage time are magically in sync; rather it's because the word vintage is just a figure of speech, a metaphor for saying that so many of us don't really belong here - not in the present, or the past, or the future - but that all of us seek a life that exists elsewhere in time, or elsewhere on-screen, and that not being able to find it, we have learned to make do with what life throws our way.
André Aciman, Homo Irrealis