The Assault

The narrator begins this chapter with a rumination about time—in common parlance, we conceptualize the past as if our backs are turned to it, while we look toward the future in front of us. The narrator continues: “If time is movement, then it must be moving through another kind of time, and the secondary time through yet another; and thus time is endlessly multiplied” (151). The narrator also notes that the concept of facing the future is flawed:

For the image implies that events somehow already exist in the future, reach the present at a determined moment, and finally come to rest in the past. But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute. Therefore such a person has his face turned toward the void, whereas it is the past behind him that is visible, stored in the memory (151).

The narrator remarks that this is why, when the Greeks speak about the future, they say: “What do we still have behind us?” (151). In this sense, Anton Steenwijk is a Greek: He stands with his back to the future and his face toward the past.

Anton marries his second wife, Liesbeth, in 1968: one year after his divorce from Saskia.