A letter on our peculiar fondness for the past, and a prescription for our negative emotions regarding it.
S.R.,
I dare say that our longing for the past is a particularly modern phenomenon.
By this I do not mean to say that my knowledge of classical literature (which is only really confined to the Western tradition), is so extensive, so far-reaching, that I’ve been able to eliminate this feeling from our predecessors’ psychology.
I merely mean to say that in course of my personal reading,
“And I feel how slight it is,”
Cicero, In Defense of the Poet Archias, I. (my translation)
I have noticed its absence.
Ennui: A Particularly Modern Affliction
The ennui that we feel for the past, which is not at all dissimilar to the experiences of shame and guilt that we find in the literature of antiquity (Cicero is a particularly good epitome of ancient, i.e., Hellenistic, psychology, or at least that of the Stoics, in his Tusculan Disputations), has its own kind of nuance -regret, that is, and a twinge of sadness at the passing of time, not at all unlike the feeling of snow that can’t be brushed off.
We find shame and guilt in our classical poets, and, to name just one example, Orestes’ matricide in Aeschylus’ The Libation Bearers, or its much more human portrayal by Euripides in his Electra.
I feel this lack most of all with respect to ancient philosophy; it seems absent from Classical Greek philosophy, from the Presocratics, from the Hellenistic philosophers – but far be it from me to play the anthropologist or the literary critic (one could speculate that this absence is due to the primacy of the idea of the “sage” in ancient philosophy, .
This supposed dearth leaves me either to claw at the few instances which do exist, of which I am now ignorant, or to draw from a different well entirely, i.e., our moderns and contemporaries, for my consolation.
“And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect. And as for that object, it depends on chance whether we come upon it or not before we ourselves must die.”
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. I, Swann’s Way, p. 60
Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin
What is our longing for the past?
Tonight I write under the bulb of a fluorescent lamp, in the lobby of an apartment building not far from Grand Central Terminal. The night affords me no lack of opportunities to visit the past in my mind’s eye, and the memories arise spontaneously and evoke feelings, though dulled by time, now made fresh upon visitation. And in a moment I feel the immense weight of seconds and years, and am filled with a sadness that is, for all my efforts, incorrigible.
The emotion is complicated: it has, as its content, the memory, which is neither a fact nor a fiction, but my own recreation of some series of moments in time. I remember something, but I do not remember it as it occurred (i.e., as a series of facts separate from my experience), only as it happened to me. There is an inextricably subjective element. But enough of trite and banal sentiments.
The emotion stands somewhere between sadness and guilt, sometimes gives way to anger, sometimes to joy, sometimes to a momentary ecstasy (and by ecstasy I mean a feeling of standing outside of oneself, feeling detached from oneself).
It is triggered, perhaps, by the minutiae of everyday experience: a scent, a scene, a face, a voice. There is that charming passage of Proust’s,
“And as soon as I had recognized the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I used to be sent before lunch, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine.”
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. I, Swann’s Way, p. 64
Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin
This passage merely illustrates the “power,” as it were, of the memory – the force of recollection on our conscious experience.
But what of our reflections on its contents?
Anger, Sadness, and Regret: Misplaced Emotions
Our sadness, our anger, our guilt at the memory – all are inappropriately placed. In saying this I am attempting to be both descriptive (i.e., this is a matter of fact) and prescriptive (i.e., this is how it should be).
Let me plead my own case.
Our sadness is “inappropriately” placed.
This likewise applies to our anger and our guilt. It (the particular emotion, e.g., sadness) has as its object (that thing at which it is directed) something which no longer exists – that moment in time, that interaction, those words, that face. The pain we feel, the heaviness, that hollow feeling are by no means fictitious. The emotion and its effects are real, yet the past is an idea to which we tenaciously cling, and nothing more than, as it were, a ghost. We nurture a non-reality.
Sadness (in its broadest definition) results from a feeling of loss or deprivation. Anger results from indignation at our (or their) having been treated unjustly. Guilt, from a feeling our wrongdoing, whether intentional or accidental.
It’s not simply a question of possession (obviously nothing in our lives is permanent; no thing in our lives remains constant). Nor of immutability (obviously the past isn’t subject to change), nor of responsibility (obviously the passage of time does not absolve us of our agency at that point in time): the feeling necessarily involves all of these, but what is pernicious here is our clinging to the past in such a way that perpetuates the renews the vigor of these emotions.
This clinging is not merely the result of a particular way of thinking (i.e., about the memory in question). It involves a complex web of beliefs that must be untangled wherein each belief, in turn, is subject to scrutiny.
But what do I mean?
To Forgive is to Break with our Misguided Conceptions
Imagine a man who wrongs his spouse (some infidelity, let’s say, which is all too common).
There is a degree to which, after repentance and the passage of time, his guilt is untenable (that is, in the eyes of an outside observer).
There is a degree to which his spouses’s anger, their sadness, is untenable.
Upon reflection, there is no amount of time which can be prescribed for each and every case: the epiphany which heals all wounds is hard-won, and it is not entirely in our power as to when it comes (it is a matter of circumstance). Entirely in our power is the content of our reflection, to that degree in which it is chosen (i.e., content is a matter of how one views the event, the memory – through what lens they interact with it on an emotional level).
Say this man is haunted for years by his infidelity. There must come a point wherein he realizes he can no longer blame himself; the adulterer was a different man, and that man has been eroded by the passage of time (assuming his guilt is genuine, not feigned, and his error isn’t persistent).
His spouse must too let go of their anger, their sadness; part of this consists in a forgetting of themselves – that “me” that was wronged is not the “I” that I am now, and so the same for the perpetrator.
What I am trying to say is this: the ability to forgive, broadly “to let go,” consists in breaking with the non-reality of our memory, of our thoughts. It involves compassion – for ourselves and for others. Though the enormity of some wrongs is inhuman, our wrongs do not detract from our humanity.
The same holds for our sadness, though it is much less concerned with our (or their) responsibility, and more with our perceived loss. Of this, much can be said, but suffice it to say this, that while our losses can never be replaced, there are gifts that provide in their absence.
So much for all the regret, anger, and sadness one accrues, like baubles, over the course of a lifetime…
I’m sure there was more that I intended to say to you, but I’ve forgotten it.
Farewell.
Sincerely,
George