Apparently "tomorrow" means "in a week". I keep meaning to write, but then I get distracted and lose the inspiration. I apologize in advance for the somewhat stream-of-consciousness style of the below; I am rather tired and wanted to dump out some of my thoughts that I had been meaning to write about, and that is how it happened.
Last week there were several days of warm weather -- it was above 50 degrees (F) one day -- and this led to my thinking about the past. There is something about a fresh breeze, moist and cool-but-not-cold air blowing in my face, that brings up memories and vivid emotions. There is something powerful about the past. I remember things I did, places I have been, thoughts I have though, and (perhaps most poignantly) emotions I have felt, and there is something otherworldly about them. Sometimes I can almost feel myself back in the past situation; on other occasions, it is as if I am remembering not my own life but the life of some past self who, somehow, is not the 'I' that I am now.
Of course I know that I am the 'I' of those memories, occasional feelings to the contrary aside; my ontological theory of myself is not so muddled as all that. But there is the fact that the past often seems so arbitrary; I remember what did happen (or I do at least insofar as my memory is correct), but it seems like it might just as well have happened otherwise. I went, for example, to Mathcamp in the summer of 2004; might I have not? What if I had done differently? The past is strange; it is immutable, but it is hazy. My memories are my view of my past, but they are as through a glass, darkly; at times I hardly recognize myself. The past is so fuzzy to me, it almost seems as though it should not be so set in stone. Surely I could go back and fix those mistakes I remember making; make different choices. But no, the past is fixed; there is no going back; there is only going forward. Exiles cannot return home; none of us can return to the past. It seems strange that there should be something so irrevocable about a contingent thing, but that, I suppose, is part of the grand miracle of the universe.
The past is irrevocable. It cannot be changed. But of course that is also to say that all actions are, in a sense, irrevocable. When I choose to do one thing rather than another, I make not a momentary but a permanent choice. For all eternity I have done what I have done, and there is no possibility of later erasing it. Lewis talks about the mistaken conception people have that the mere passage of time wipes away sins and mistakes. Of course it does not; it cannot. No matter how distant I feel from that young fool who cheated, or lusted, or did some other evil, no matter how many years ago it was, it is nevertheless true that I did it. "What has been done cannot be undone." (How grateful I am -- at least in my lucid moments -- for God's forgiveness! There certainly can be no other way out.)
And another thought. There is something almost mystical about memory, especially memory of emotion. I stand and let the breeze wash over me, and I remember that summer of 2004, where I recall -- it was in Maine -- standing in the cool moist breeze and feeling those same emotions which I feel now in remembering it. Lewis talked of a certain poignant feeling which he remembered and longed for, but when he honestly examined his memories, he found that the emotion he remembered was this kind of longing itself. This must be akin, if not the same. It is certainly with some fondness that I see myself standing as I remember doing some four and a half years ago, though some of the things I remember thinking about that summer were rather foolish. (I like to think that I have learned better. I remember thinking, soon after, as I realized my foolishness, that I was learning something. I am not certain how sure I am that I have, indeed, learned anything meaningful.)
I get the same sort of experience remembering such things as I get from thinking about certain literature (the good kind, that has deep ideas and makes one think). The memories have the advantage that they are trying, at least, to tell a story that is very close to me, though the storyteller is generally rather inferior. (I wonder how I should tell the story of my life... Would it be any good? Would anyone -- even myself -- think it interesting or profound?) I think I can learn from literature; I think I can learn from my memories, though quite often it is difficult to say exactly what I have learned. Quite often it is even more difficult because I do not try to say it until I have begun to forget. I emphatically maintain that this does not mean I have not learned anything. But what, exactly, is it that I have learned just now?
I couldn't say.
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