On the Eve of the Future

Abstract

It was as Eve's literary executor that I believe I first encountered a talk she gave about a decade ago that was called, in its various incarnations, Come as you Are or Reality and Realization.11 don't recall that Eve shared it with me at the time she wrote it, as she often did with her writing. Then again, she may have, and I may have forgotten, not wanting to take in what she was saying. It was in something of the same state of mind that I agreed to be Eve's literary executor several years ago: not wanting to ac cept what I knew I was agreeing to, not wanting to believe what Eve real ized would come. I'm aiming now to put together a volume of Eve's writing that represents her work since Touching Feeling was published in 2003. In the 1999 talk to which I refer, Eve wrote that it was learning that a cancer I had thought was in remission had in fact become incurable that made inescapably vivid in repeated mental shuttle-passes the consider able distance between knowing that one will die and realizing it. Just this shuttle, I would suggest, colors much of the work Eve was doing towards the book on Proust she was working on over the last several years. In fol lowing her realization, I believe we can find our way to the many futures Eve holds out for us still.