To begin with: nothing.

That is, a piece of flotsam—an anecdote.  A trifle.  A joke.

Or so it should have been, but wasn’t.  Not at the time.  At the time, it had in fact what Hope in those days called a Profound Effect on her.  (She had a tendency, back then, to capitalize important nouns, adjectives, and verbs.  Now, looking back, she rolls her eyes at her own former, mock-arch self.)

The teller of this anecdote, this trifle, was a young man she liked—or, as she would have said, archly, in an attempt to cover up true feeling (which in this case, she thought, could quite possibly be love, a word she carefully kept lowercase, or its precursor—almost love), “Liked with a capital L.”

She was in art school then.  He was a graduate student in philosophy—as it would turn out, not the only but only the first of a series of philosophers-in-training with whom she would eventually fall in love or almost-love.  Thus she later came to think of him as The First Philosopher (and later still, efficiently, as TFP). 

                The story TFP told Hope, when they were first dating, went like this:

                In his second semester of graduate school, two years before he and Hope had met, he had been a research assistant, working for a professor of metaphysics.  “You know,” he said, “universals, causality, space, time, possibility.”  Hope nodded gravely, not because she knew but because it was unthinkable to own up to not knowing.

“So this guy was interested in time, that was his main gig, and he had me in the library day after day, reading and making notes for him and photocopying journal articles.  There were days, nights, when I was in there for six, seven hours without a break.  I was a veritable time machine.”  He paused, and Hope laughed, on cue (and yet her laughter wasn’t forced: she was genuinely, frequently, amused by him. That he expected her to be didn’t dampen her amusement in the least).  “Then one day I was in the library, working my way through the card catalog.  I’d been there for four, maybe five hours already, searching for some obscure find that would knock the alter kocker’s socks off, some journal article he’d never seen—something marginal, yet seminal—when I came upon an entry in the catalog for a journal I’d never heard of.  I couldn’t believe it.  Here I’d been searching through Metaphysical Review and The Journal of the Nature of Existence and Ontology and Cosmology and The American Quarterly of German Idealism, and there was one incredibly obvious one I’d overlooked.  I went racing to the stacks to find it.”  He paused again, poked his chopsticks into the single order of cold noodles with sesame paste the two of them were splitting for their dinner, collected a clump of noodles, lifted it and pointed it at her, and grinned.  “And there I was, a few minutes later, with a copy of Time magazine in my hands, utterly flummoxed.  I mean, totally unable to make sense of what I was looking at.”

It was the purity of his abstractedness that did her in.  She felt herself fall hopelessly for him—felt herself step off the edge of a precipice on which she hadn’t even known she was standing.

Time in The First Philosopher’s hands had finished her off.