Tag Archives: Santayana

Past, Present, Future

In 1905, George Santayana famously wrote, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. The statement is from his five-volume book, The Life of Reason: The Phases of Human Progress.

In 1943, Eugene O’Neill wrote, There is no present or future—only the past happening over and over again—now. That declaration is from his stage play, A Moon For the Misbegotten.

In his 1950 novel, Requiem For A Nun, William Faulkner echoed the notion when he wrote, The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Although I could never be confused with those three literary giants, I too wrote on the same theme, more poetically: What’s past is the past—so quickly it passed—But it’s not where I want to stay. Those are the last two lines in the third stanza of my seven-stanza poem entitled, I Haven’t the Time—

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But I also wrote of the future in that same poem: When all has been said, I still look ahead /To life’s next opening curtain. The premises of the poem are that life marches resolutely forward, that I haven’t the time to concern myself with its past, that I eagerly embrace its future.

Nevertheless, I’ve often wondered if there even exists a past or a future. Perhaps, as James Joyce stated in a 1935 interview with Jacques Mercanton, There is not past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.

It may be, perhaps, that my poetic curtain is opening, not on some ephemeral future, but only on more of the ever-morphing present. I’ve long appreciated the analogy that life’s progress is akin to riding a train from one’s point of embarkation to one’s final destination, with innumerable stops along the way. People get on, share the ride with me, and every now and then, some get off—perhaps because their journey has ended, perhaps to continue their journey on another train. Indeed, I change trains from time to time myself, although my journey still continues.

My train moves from whence to hence, but I, gazing through its windows at the passing parade, remain aboard in my encapsulated present. The views change constantly, but my surroundings on the train remain, for the most part, constant and familiar. Locales no sooner flash by the window into the past in one direction, than future ones appear from the other. Riding the train is like being everywhere at once while never leaving the same place—Joyce’s eternal present.

Despite these musings, however, I find myself reflecting on the past more often these days—because of my age, maybe, now that my tomorrows are vastly outnumbered by my yesterdays. Although memory is an increasingly unreliable tool, it’s still easier to remember what’s transpired than it is to predict what’s yet to come.

I recently published a short memoir for family and close friends, Being Me, and the exercise both surprised and cheered me. For instance, I re-affirmed that I have lived a blessed and privileged life to this point, surrounded by people who love me. And happily, I discovered I have almost no regrets about events from the past. The few I do have are less the consequence of my own actions and more the result of external forces acting on me, forces I could not control. With the exception of those, I realized there’s virtually nothing I would seek to change, had I the power to do so.

Writing the memoir took me back to places I’d been along the way, and I grasped anew how much I had enjoyed being there—my parents’ hearth, my own homes with my wife and daughters, our trips to foreign lands, my various career stops. I have no wish to return to any of them, to be sure, for I enjoy where I am right now too much. But I greatly appreciate that I had those experiences and opportunities—even if I see them now as only images flying past the windows of my train.

The future holds no fear for me. Curiosity? Anticipation? Of course! Those next opening curtains still claim my attention. I have no idea when my train will drop me at my final destination, but the present journey continues to be enjoyable and fulfilling. I have no clear understanding of what awaits when I shall disembark for the last time, although I do suspect the past, present, and future all will end at once. After all, Einstein held that the distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

I imagine there to be an entirely different matrix awaiting after my consciousness has ceased, where time has no meaning, where eternity reigns…well, eternally. In the meantime, I hearken to this advice from St. Luke: …live for today, because yesterday is gone and tomorrow may never come.

My journey’s end will come, however, and I look to it in this fashion—

When that day is nigh, as ‘twill be by and by,
I hope it will be widely said,
That as man and boy, I strove for the joy
Of living until I was dead.

Alternative Facts? Really?

The sky is falling!  The sky is falling!

So proclaimed Chicken Little on her hysterical run about the barnyard, a story I first heard as a child.  Fortunately for us all, she was wrong, and the sky stayed where it’s supposed to be, high o’erhead.

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I remember being terrified at the time, wondering if the sky actually could fall in upon us.  Later on, I imagined that the poor hen was either lying or profoundly deluded.  Now, though, I wonder if she may have merely been asserting an ‘alternative fact’—something she truly believed despite reliable evidence to the contrary.

Another childhood tale concerned the shepherd boy who cried wolf.  Perhaps bored by his lonely work, or maybe seeking attention to satisfy a needy personality, he repeatedly roused the neighbouring villagers with his false alarms.

Wolf!  Wolf!  The wolf is attacking my sheep!

The villagers, of course, rallied to his rescue each time, only to discover they had been fooled, not just once but again and again.  Predictably, when the wolf really did attack, the boy’s alarms went unheeded by his protectors, unwilling any longer to believe what they were hearing.  And the boy lost his sheep to the ravenous wolf.

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I wonder if he might have tried to explain his behaviour afterwards by claiming, despite evidence to the contrary, that he had not been lying; that, indeed, the wolf really had been lurking on each occasion—an ‘alternative fact’ not apparent to the villagers, but truly believed by the boy.

It was accepted by most people, once upon a long-ago time, that lying was just that—lying.  Untrue.  False.  Not supported by rational analysis of available evidence.  And, most importantly, wrong.

Both Chicken Little and the shepherd boy appeared not to subscribe to that tenet.  But their stories are fables, intended as moral teachings—much like the likely-apocryphal story of George Washington’s declaration after cutting down a prized cherry tree: I cannot tell a lie!  There was no actual harm done to real people by either of them.

Alas, in our world today, immersed to the point of drowning in a sea of social media and instant news, we are in danger of being sorely harmed by those who would deliberately lie to us.  Or, as they might claim, present us with ‘alternative facts’.

In 1905, in his book, The Life of Reason, George Santayana wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

George Orwell, in his 1949 opus, 1984, presented a society that not only did not remember the past, but actively sought to eliminate it through newspeak—defined by Merriam-Webster as: a language…designed to diminish the range of thought…characterized by the elimination or alteration of certain words, the substitution of one word for another…and the creation of words for political purposes.

Ah, yes—the creation of words for political purposes, and the use of those words to craft phrases and pronouncements designed to bamboozle the common folk naïve enough to trust their leaders.  Does that sound familiar?

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It is as if a strategy from the past has resurrected itself (from a psychological profile composed by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, describing Hitler’s rules of political conduct and media coverage):

…never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame…people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one… [and] will sooner or later believe it.

And if these big lies are called ‘alternative facts’, well so much the better for the tellers of tall tales, the snake-oil salespeople of our modern era.  It is as if the wolf has returned to the shepherd boy’s flock, this time disguised in sheep’s clothing.  And who among the villagers will hear the anguished cries for help, and respond before it is too late?

Après nous, le deluge!  This phrase, attributed to Madame de Pompadour, courtesan to Louis XV of France, might be interpreted as—After us, let the flood come; we don’t care what happens when we’re gone.  No one in power today utters such thoughts so baldly, of course, but their actions speak more loudly than words ever could.

Those who are left behind will certainly care what happens, however.  But sadly, it may be much too late for them to restore what they will have lost.  How does one go about putting the sky back in the…..well, in the sky?

Beware the demagogue who claims that only (s)he knows what’s wrong, and only (s)he can fix it.  Resist the temptation to believe the easy, convenient, so-called truths (s)he presents.  And protest—long and loud and disbelievingly, with evidence to back you up—whenever those falsehoods are presented as bona fide.

Alternative facts?  Really?