The Past Imperfect

            There was an item in the news earlier this month that two of the world’s most powerful telescopes, the Hubble and the Spitzer, are operating in tandem to gather images of the universe in its relative infancy, by focusing on galaxies more than 12 billion light-years away (and hence, sending images to us more than 12 billion years old, in a universe that is currently estimated to be about 13.7 billion years old), and that there are plans for another telescope to gather even older images in 2018, corresponding to events that occurred a mere hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang.

This is just the most recent example of an interesting phenomenon that occurs as our civilization continues to evolve: we develop greater and greater capabilities for recapturing our past.  In 1993, moviegoers were entertained by Jurassic Park, about an enterprising group of scientists who were able to resurrect extinct dinosaurs through DNA sequencing and cloning technology, and in the years since, there has been serious discussion about doing exactly that – at least with more recent species lost to extinction, such as the woolly mammoth.  And DNA sequencing has allowed us to better understand both how species have evolved and how our own human ancestors diversified and migrated, forming the races, tribes, and nations of modern times.

Even in our personal lives, modernity has been giving us an increasing capability to retain and capture our earliest past.  The field of psychiatry known as psychoanalysis, when it came into vogue at the end of the Victorian era, suggested that we might resolve our most serious psychological issues and lead more productive, happy lives if we delve deeply enough and far enough back into our life histories, unearthing and resolving conflicts involving our relationships as young children with our parents, and its practitioners engaged in techniques that made it possible for us to do so.  Technology has certainly helped us to preserve more of our personal and social history, with the evolution of photography, sound recording, and now, both sound and video recording with the simple use of a smart phone.  The capability for recording, and storing, records of our individual and collective lives has increased immensely in just the past generation.

Why is it, as we mature and move forward in time, that we have a growing desire to recapture the past?  The desire to preserve can certainly become pathological, as currently illustrated in the American television program Hoarders, about persons who retain nearly everything, and throw little if anything away.  They seem to be desperate to hold onto anything that has ever come into their lives.  I must confess that when I hear of stories like this, I look at my own life and say “There but for the Grace of God go I,” because there are some things that I have been very reluctant to throw away.  It has been almost impossible for me to let go of any book that I have ever owned, and so I find myself having to put an additional bookshelf into my home about once every five years.  (Perhaps Kindle will now save me from eventually walling myself in with bookshelves, while at the same time making it even easier for me to retain every book that I have ever read.) 

In many, if not most, cases, I think that the physical objects we hold onto provide tangible counterparts to important events in our lives.  Clearly this is the case with wedding rings, or college diplomas, or birth certificates of children.  They give our memories of these events substance: something that we can look at, and reach out and touch, so that they are not just merely thoughts in our minds – thoughts which will pass away when we pass away.  Of course, the meaningfulness of these physical objects is far from universal, and their value is often completely lost on others, even those close to us.  (Hence the ordeal of having to sit through a presentation of somebody else’s stack of vacation photographs.)  Many years ago, during an unhappy period of my life, I was driving one morning to a workshop that I had to attend, and stopped at a fast food restaurant for breakfast.  The restaurant happened to be giving away stuffed animals as part of a promotion for a new movie, and so I took one before resuming my trip.  And because it was right around that time that the circumstances of my life improved rather dramatically, the stuffed animal came to be permanently linked with a happy memory for me.  So to this day, the tiny, smiling “lucky Simba” sits on a shelf in my bedroom.  It will probably still be there on the day that I die, and when the “junk” in my home is committed to the flames, like the “Rosebud” sled in Citizen Kane, the stuffed toy will be cast away without the slightest suspicion that it meant anything to anybody.  When I was a boy, attending with my parents a holiday party at my grandfather’s house, I noticed a large Bible sitting in a prominent place on a shelf in his living room.  It just so happened that I had embarked on an ambitious project that year to read the Bible from cover to cover, and so, in order to impress my grandfather, I asked him if I could pick it up and read it.  To my shock (as well as that of my parents, and the others in attendance), he angrily shouted at me not to touch it.  A while later, it was explained that this Bible had been a prized possession of my grandmother, who had recently passed away, and my grief-stricken grandfather had never wanted it moved from the place where she had kept it.  Of course I didn’t understand his feelings then . . . but I do now.

What then, is it that compels us to capture more of the past, and to retain it, through material objects?  I think that we are always endeavoring to give our individual and collective pasts a more enduring existence that we hope will survive us, somehow, after the ephemeral imprints of our memories fade away.  And, by capturing more of our pasts, we hope to compile a meaningful story of our existence, with a beginning, middle, and end, which will endow it with a significance that will transcend the transitory nature of our time on earth.  Individually, and collectively, as nations and as a species, we want to believe that we are part of a drama that has an ultimate purpose – a destiny to be fulfilled, and by better understanding the most distant reaches of our past, we hope to be better able to trace out the trajectory of that drama.

In the Japanese film After Life, recently deceased persons are directed to find a single happy memory, which they will then be able to re-experience for eternity.  Is that what a real heaven might be: to collect a sort of “greatest hits” compilation of our memories, and be able to relive them for eternity?  For the German philosopher Nietzsche, such a prospect, “eternal recurrence”, presented an ongoing challenge to live a meaningful life:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.' [The Gay Science, §341]

In the same vein, might we be forced to undergo a sort of trial in the afterlife, as in the American film Defending Your Life, and learn through this that the real secret of fulfillment had been to overcome one’s fears, and live life to the fullest?  Will we have second, third, and multiple chances to do so, as in the movie Groundhog Day?

Perhaps, with the continuing advance of technology, we will someday be able to memorialize everything that passed through our minds in a more permanent, substantial way.  And then it will be possible for others to recall each and every one of our lives, and review and examine them completely.  But even if this comes about, what would compel anyone to do so?  The sheer number of individual human existences seems to undermine the special value of what each of them had lived and experienced.  Still, there is something precious about every human existence, and perhaps when the capability is realized to see each one in their fullest, then future lives will be enriched by reviewing them, examining them, and drawing tangible lessons about how they spent their limited spans of time on this planet.  Maybe, in this manner, future human beings will find the blueprint for living lives that are truly worth preserving in memory, and even reliving, over and over and over again.