Temporal recovery and prescience or preknowldge clearly belong to the realm of imagined time, for they brazenly threaten to disobey the unidirectional structure of successive or linear time. It goes without saying that the acts of fantasizing recovery or preknowledge belong to what becomes an expanded sense of nowness. Fantasizing trascends mere temporal imagining, for the processes of recall and expectation are transformed and accelerated into momentary wish fulfillment.

Figuratively speaking, fantasizing and imagining may be thought of as running in opposite directions along the same spatial plane. Apparently restrained by the objective mold of chronological succession, imagining in the form of recall returns the experience to the present while fantasy of recovery “succeeds” in “transporting” us to the “time” of the original experience. Expectation on the other hand, “projects” outward our feelings, hopes, and dreams as bolts of content to fill the emptiness of future while fantasies of preknowledge barely “succeed” in bringing to us, through subjective prematureness, an elaborated interpretation of a now replete future.

Seventy-three-year-old Sam Fischman, while not a poor man, is certainly not rich, and is never going to be rich. Over and over he insists that this fact doesn't bother him, for he's had all the rich friends a man ever needed. But it takes no special sensitivity to recognize how disappointed he is with his own lack of success, and what he perceives as his son's preordained series of failures.

In six years of conducting research on America's poor Jews I have met no one more delightful than the seventy-year-old man I will call Yankel Kanter. As the sort of research I do is based on speaking with people over a long period of time, it is only natural that I would be especially attracted to such a man as Yankel. If the purpose of my work is to allow people to describe in their own words how their lives are being led, then Yankel, eager to talk, was the perfect person to participate in the research.

Over the years of our friendship Yankel has talked about a great many things, although never once about the death of his wife and children in a death camp in Poland. He is in his way, although he would never say this, a scholarly and learned gentleman whose immediate response to almost any question of mine was: “Oh you know, just the other night I was reading a book on that very subject.“

Beatrice Waters lives in the corner flat on the top floor of a council house in the Islington district of London. She spent four years of her life making the arrangements to rent a flat in this particular block of council houses. Four long years of speaking with this or that authority and arguing with her husband over whether they had made the right decision. At fifty, Henry Waters doubted he could survive still another move. He couldn't even remember all the places in which he had lived, as if immigrating from the West Indies to England wasn't significant enough. “Don't you think,” he would ask Beatrice, “there comes a time that people just settle down, no matter how good or bad a deal they've made for themselves? How long do you keep changing homes just to prove you're really getting somewhere in the world?’

The study of time in personal perceptions and social lives is hardly a new enterprise. A rather large body of literature on these subjects exists, and much of the material is utterly fascinating. People have examined orientations to the past, present, and future, the tempi of living, cycles, biological and social rhythms, the meaning of expectation, and of course memory. One of the more popular areas of research involves categorizing people as past, present, or futureoriented. These so-called temporal orientations are associated with various personality traits, as for example the heightened past orientations of anxious people, or the characteristic future orientations of highly achieving people. It has also been common practice to label according to various social classes within a society: the poor, present-oriented; the middle class, futureoriented; and the affluent, past- or, more precisely, tradition-oriented.

The 400 block of Clymer Avenue in Mattapan once boasted a line of gorgeous houses with handsome lawns and sizable garages. Forty years ago those who knew the area would have called the block and a few blocks surrounding it the neighborhood of the hoi polloi. There was, however, a smugness about those who lived in that block, it was said. And because they were Jews, it was also said, they should have known better and treated others who didn't have as much more kindly. After all, if the Jews don't help each other, who will?

In time the neighborhood around Clymer Avenue changed. Most of the rich families moved to Jamaica Plain, Brookline, and Newton. Some families moved as far away as Lexington to the north. All but a few of the grand homes were tom down, and simple, efficient apartment buildings erected in their place.