dreſt in Man's Apparel

impression, soleil levant — claude monet, 1872

karen’s favorite twilight zone episodes (6/x): (1x11) and when the sky was opened (wr. r. serling & richard matheson; dir. douglas heyes)

both these short stories are about men who's acquaintances & connections & important life elements start slowly disappearing as if they'd never existed, no one remembers them, they've disappeared from photos etc. until basically all their connections to the world & people who would recognise them and remember them have dissolved away and then they eventually disappear themselves. in "disappearing act" this is not explained at all or really have much of a sense of like. higher concepts. it's just something that happens to the protagonist (who is gone but whose journal -- which ends mid sentence to indicate what happened. very fun ofc -- we are reading). maybe sort of a product or consequence of his dissatisfaction & disconnect in his life, but it's never really gone into. in "private - keep out" the main character is talking to a distressed friend who is explaining that their lifelong mutual friend & his wife (who the narrator doesn't remember) have disappeared from the world & he's the only one who remembers them. he says this is after they all three had this really strong sense of (almost) grasping a sort of bigger understanding of the world & its workings. and then midway through this conversation the friend goes to make a phone call & never comes back, leaving the narrator to wonder when this might happen to him

but anyways there's this even earlier short story called "the street that wasn't there" (1941) by clifford d simak and carl jacobi, which is not exactly the same idea as the later three stories but has some similarities & may have been an influence. in this one an extremely isolated man who basically stays entirely in his neighborhood & talks to nobody starts to notice that parts of his neighborhood are disappearing as if they were never there -- e.g. a whole block between two other blocks disappears so the two others are next to each other now -- and as it disappears more and more he starts to put together that this is connected to basically major plagues and wars in the outside world he has entirely tuned out (dubious but we'll suspend our disbelief), and that basically because everyone has died out their memory & idea of the world has disappeared too, and so the world is physically disappearing around him without the people to like. see it or experience it, and he's alone. and slowly his less important memories of the world & the relevent piece of the physical world disappear around him and gets smaller & smaller.