Nostalgia and other nostrums

This is perhaps the irony of life: we would like our lives to last as long as possible: but how do we live with its exhausting continuity?

Most of us have a Janus-like approach to the temporality of our lives: we have one eye on the past and one on the future with no time for the present. With the past, we have this persistent urge to dissect it and in the process are swayed by a whole gamut of feelings and emotions. We recall with evident pleasure some of these past events. Some of us are so proud of our journey so far and our previous ports of call – and confident that others will wish to celebrate this voyage and emulate it even – that we publish memoirs or at least ask others peep into our private lives via things like social media.

And we may regret too that some events had not happened and attempt to suppress these memories whenever they try to escape their hiding places in our minds. In his magnificent novel, The Towers of Silence, Paul Scott uses the tin-trunk that Miss Barbie Batchelor holds on to as a symbol for the luggage of one’s past, one’s personal history and of the world’s history – a “luggage crammed with relics of achievement, of failure, of continuing aspirations and optimistic expectations” (118). This incessant homesickness for what we are sure we have definitely experienced, witnessed and remember is shaped and nurtured by memories that are imprecise at best and are a product of our brain’s attempt to sustain a unique chiaroscuro called the self.

As for the future, it is an epistemic enigma. It does not have a discernible threshold. We have no usable yardsticks to make sense of it. Nor do we have the memories of the past (however incomplete and faulty) that at least attempt to define it. Faced with such inchoateness we opt for a rosy fiction (in place of a bleak narrative) and cram it with the “aspirations and optimistic expectations” Paul Scott refers to. Marketers appear adept in using this seemingly common human frailty in their work to trigger a desire in us to buy goods that may or not satisfy these ambitions. (The Gold Lotto organisation in Australia, for instance, has for a number of years apparently successfully used the hope-filled refrain based on the Beach Boys single “wouldn’t it be nice…” in its marketing campaigns.)

When dealing with the present, time does not permit us the leeway to speculate – futilely or otherwise – about how life is lived in the present. It is somewhat like a quantum object which is observer dependent. If we did not notice it, it has already disappeared and we cannot re-experience it. The Venerable Bede lamented the brevity of life comparing it to the passage of a bird through a well-lit dining hall, entering from the darkness at one end and exiting through the darkness at the other before anyone became aware of it (Manguel 1581-1583). The present, as fleeting and slippery as life itself, serves in a way as a metaphor for life.

Some scientists think that our neural architecture may prevent us from experiencing the present and hence – even if we wished to – we can never really do so. As Jan Westerhoff from Oxford points out, this is because the processing of neural information takes time. For instance, if you feel the warmth of the fire with your hand, this perception takes a finite time to travel through neural pathways before reaching the brain. In the brain, furthermore, it is integrated with other accumulated sensory data to come up with a “complex coherent representation involving objects or events and their properties.” By the time this cognitive activity materialises, the moment that gave rise to it is already in the past. “When trying to connect with the present moment,” Westerhoff observes, we face a similar situation to “someone looking at a distant star, the light of which still reaches his eyes, while the star itself has long ceased to be” (96).

We have therefore only the past to make sense of the present. (It is still however not the present as measured in one single moment that we comprehend this way; it is instead somewhat akin to the wider and nebulous “present times” that we live in.) Moreover, we use the past as a tool despite the past being a foreign country where, as L.P. Hartley famously wrote, they do things differently; and, almost every moment, the past becomes more distant from us in every way for “The Times They Are a-Changin'” as Bob Dylan sang. This use of the past to comprehend the present, whose efficacy is not always assured, is a bit like borrowing ideas from another country or culture in an attempt to mould them to our needs.

The nature of any rubric is that there are always exceptions to the rule and thus we invariably find those who wish to break the mould. It appears that there are some who are consciously or otherwise aware of the fruitlessness of such an attempt to use the past to tangle with the present. Notwithstanding the human impediments, neural or otherwise, they choose to take the present as it happens and try to live in one long moment. They endeavour to attenuate the past and the faults that one wishes to forget. This attempt to do away with the past is also impelled by a fear of being pigeon-holed or burdened with identities or other similar not always helpful baggage. (In some cases it could even be a kind of selective amnesia: an almost deliberate attempt to suppress the unpleasant – such as a childhood that for some is better forgotten or remains “lost”.)

This attitude, combined with an intentional rootlessness could give rise to a cosmopolitan outlook in one whereby one thinks home is where one is and would prefer to term oneself a citizen of the world rather than be constricted to a (historical and personal) time and place. The Australian poet and essayist, Kim Cheng Boey, once asked someone he met during his travels in India: “Do you call it home now, your father’s home in Bangalore?” “I don’t call it anything,” the man replied. “What does it matter, coming or going, here or there… We are only passing through, my friend” (A traveller 1). In a similar vein, historian and essayist Tony Judt expressed his preference for ‘the edge’: “where countries, communities, allegiances, affinities, and roots bump uncomfortably up against one another–where cosmopolitanism is not so much an identity as the normal condition of life.” Judt considered “identity” a dangerous word: artificially stimulated “national debates” on identity, for example, can be “a flimsy cover for political exploitation of anti-immigrant sentiment”. He feared further that “being ‘Danish’ or ‘Italian,’ ‘American’ or ‘European’ won’t just be an identity; it will be a rebuff and a reproof to those whom it excludes. …The privileges of citizenship, the protections of card-holding residency rights, will be wielded [by the state] as political trumps. They are already doing so. In this brave new century we shall miss the tolerant, the marginals: the edge people” (Judt).

In the end memories are as impossible to get rid of as shadows: they may be of varying strengths and textures but they persist nevertheless. Hence, however much we may wish to live in the moment or underplay our identities, is it possible to do away with our pasts altogether? As Paul Scott observed, “one is not ruled by the past, one does not rule or re-order it, one simply is it, in the same way that one is as well the present and part of the future…. The one thing one cannot escape in life is its continuity” (Scott 119). This is perhaps the irony of life: we would like our lives to last as long as possible: but how do we live with its exhausting continuity?

REFERENCES

“A traveller passing through.” News.com 5 Sept. 2009. http://www.news.com.au/national/a-traveller-passing-through/story-e6frfkp9-1225768832228

Judt, Tony. “Edge People.” The New York Review of Books 23 Feb. 2010. < http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/feb/23/edge-people/

Manguel, Alberto. The Library at Night. Canada: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Kindle ebook file.

Scott, Paul and Shelley C. Reece., ed. My Appointment with the Muse: Essays, 1961-75. London: Heinemann. 1986.

Westerhoff, Jan. Reality: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Kindle ebook file.