this is going to be long.
I used to have a friend named Lola. She was great! She was crazy and fun, and full of sass. She did a lot of drugs and was always kind of on the edge, but she was still smart and creative and really ambitious. But after two short years of friendship, she changed for the worse. She dropped out of high school to be a homeless drug addict, with a stupid lame boyfriend. Her entire personality changed, and she turned into a real mess. Eventually it became clear that the girl I loved was gone. My friends and I began to refer to her as if she was dead. It sounds melodramatic, but Lola has changed so much that my friend no longer exists. By now, though, I may have changed as much as Lola. Back then I lived in fear of strange phobias. But look at me now--calm, mature, independent, and a college-educated elitist! My old self is as dead as Lola. No sufficient records exist of the many silly phases I have gone through. Innumerable moments from my past are interred forever in the dusty storerooms of my memory.
There's a Kurt Vonnegut book that describes a race of aliens who see every moment happening at once. Humans look like centipedes to them--chains of versions of themselves at every point in time. But I can only see time in a human way. The only real version of myself is the one living right now. I feel weighed down by the awareness of my irretrievable past. I'm the only living link in a long chain of dead memories. But I can't disentangle myself from them because I don't want to lose the scant memories I have.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of human life is not war or violence but the continual, inevitable loss of details to the flow of time. My grandmother died recently, and at her funeral, I was amazed to hear her friends and family describe aspects of her personality I never knew existed. By the time I got to know her, crushed by old age and tragedy, much of what made her herself had already died. Even while she still lived, she had already been claimed by the flow of time. Her real death was only the final loss in a series. The lively woman I knew as a little kid is just as dead as my five year old self, and the time we shared is forever lost. We will never regain these moments.
Time does not merely rob us of complete versions of ourselves and others, it takes our thoughts. Our use of language aggravates the problem. By constructing memories of ourselves using words, we limit our capability to remember who we were beyond a shallow character sketch. If I say "when I was nine I liked scary movies and rollerblading", I see myself in these terms, and their clunky literalism obscures my memory of intangible details. This does not only affect our distant past. For example, if you were to ask me what I did yesterday, I could tell you what I did ("I ate a bacon sandwich for dinner and went to a penguin themed bar with my friend Europa"), but this is nearly meaningless. Eating that sandwich had only a slight effect on my existence. My thoughts were elsewhere, and now I have no idea where, although this information means much more to me than what I ate.
Trying to genuinely recall our own lives is as frustrating as trying to tell someone else about a dream. Our past is little more than a hazy half-remembered dream. Every passing moment robs us of a wealth of nuanced sensations. These sensations are always being replaced, but they pass so quickly we are hardly aware of what we lose. The obvious solution is to enjoy every moment for what it is. But it is not pleasure I desire--if it was, I would be glad to forget much of my past--but knowledge. Pleasure is fleeting, and slips quickly into the past, but knowledge promises to counteract forgetting. If we cannot access the complexity of our own minds, it effectively doesn't exist. This is why I see my past as dead. Just as I can never ask my grandmother about her childhood, I have just as little hope of truly remembering my own childhood, beyond snapshots and generalizations.
There's a Kurt Vonnegut book that describes a race of aliens who see every moment happening at once. Humans look like centipedes to them--chains of versions of themselves at every point in time. But I can only see time in a human way. The only real version of myself is the one living right now. I feel weighed down by the awareness of my irretrievable past. I'm the only living link in a long chain of dead memories. But I can't disentangle myself from them because I don't want to lose the scant memories I have.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of human life is not war or violence but the continual, inevitable loss of details to the flow of time. My grandmother died recently, and at her funeral, I was amazed to hear her friends and family describe aspects of her personality I never knew existed. By the time I got to know her, crushed by old age and tragedy, much of what made her herself had already died. Even while she still lived, she had already been claimed by the flow of time. Her real death was only the final loss in a series. The lively woman I knew as a little kid is just as dead as my five year old self, and the time we shared is forever lost. We will never regain these moments.
Time does not merely rob us of complete versions of ourselves and others, it takes our thoughts. Our use of language aggravates the problem. By constructing memories of ourselves using words, we limit our capability to remember who we were beyond a shallow character sketch. If I say "when I was nine I liked scary movies and rollerblading", I see myself in these terms, and their clunky literalism obscures my memory of intangible details. This does not only affect our distant past. For example, if you were to ask me what I did yesterday, I could tell you what I did ("I ate a bacon sandwich for dinner and went to a penguin themed bar with my friend Europa"), but this is nearly meaningless. Eating that sandwich had only a slight effect on my existence. My thoughts were elsewhere, and now I have no idea where, although this information means much more to me than what I ate.
Trying to genuinely recall our own lives is as frustrating as trying to tell someone else about a dream. Our past is little more than a hazy half-remembered dream. Every passing moment robs us of a wealth of nuanced sensations. These sensations are always being replaced, but they pass so quickly we are hardly aware of what we lose. The obvious solution is to enjoy every moment for what it is. But it is not pleasure I desire--if it was, I would be glad to forget much of my past--but knowledge. Pleasure is fleeting, and slips quickly into the past, but knowledge promises to counteract forgetting. If we cannot access the complexity of our own minds, it effectively doesn't exist. This is why I see my past as dead. Just as I can never ask my grandmother about her childhood, I have just as little hope of truly remembering my own childhood, beyond snapshots and generalizations.