Looking the Wrong Way? People Determined to Make the Past the Single Measure of the Present

Looking the Wrong Way: People Determined to Make the Past the Single Measure of the Present

Duc de Berry Book of Hours

While it's natural to think more about the past when you have a long one, I'm disturbed now by people who seem to be determined to make the past virtually the single measure of the present. Their heads seem to be turned backward.

I have a friend who claims no art worthy of the name has been created since WW I. Just an example: his first question of almost every call is to ask what not contemporary I may have read or seen. Especially he is disdainful of contemporary cinema and a devotee of Turner Classic Movies. The suggestion that he may be depriving himself of unexpected satisfactions gets me absolutely nowhere. The only things I believe he looks forward to are visits with his small grandson.

Probably most old people rely on recall to remind them of happy times. Our deepest sympathies are with those who have lost that past. The ones who trouble me, though, are the few who seem incapable of gaining any real pleasure, not just from the present, but from considering even a short future.

Page from the calendar of the Très Riches Heures showing the household of John, Duke of Berry exchanging New Year gifts. The Duke is seated at the right, in blue. Wikimedia Commons

Unless one is already ill, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to look forward a year or two, even with little knowledge of or interest in electronics or space exploration, since there's so much else mankind is learning every hour. I confess to absolute fascination with exploration of a universe that's so much larger than we were brought up to believe and with a microcosm right here that is almost infinitely smaller than we knew when I was a child.

Perhaps I can't look forward to great grandchildren, but I do look forward to a graduate degree for one granddaughter. I'm also foolish enough to look forward to planting next year's annuals in the perennial bed I started two Junes ago. I'm often amazed and thrilled by the new writers I'm reading. Aside from how mannered and relatively artificial the old movies are, they leave me cold most of the time because I've become accustomed to the naturalistic dialog of current fashion. I really appreciate the artistry that went into creating those more formal films, but they don't penetrate to the same level that much of what's contemporary can. With that, I have to smother the tendency to make comparisons with the incomparable — say Shakespeare or Galsworthy.

What will the weather be tomorrow? Will I see that eight-point buck strolling by my window again? I mustn't forget to record the next Masterpiece Theater episode. I have to remember to move the Japanese painted fern to a better location. Trivial or major things and events can provide the strength and above all, the curiosity that leads to the necessary joie de vivre (or at least its counterfeit) to get up in the morning.

What disturbs me the most, however, is that people with that inverted outlook deprive themselves of so much that is exciting and beautiful and even beneficial just because they refuse to sample it. They remind me of my husband's horror at the thought of eating raw shellfish — until on a business trip, his client ordered his meal for him, beginning with a dozen oysters on the half shell. To belabor a metaphor, my husband was mindful of which side his bread was buttered on, tasted the oysters, and thereafter considered them one of nature's most savory gifts.

The best may be in the past for many of us; I can't subscribe to Alexander Pope's attitude that this is the best of all possible worlds, but that doesn't mean there isn't a likelihood that much remains to prove that many things are better now, especially in healing arts and technology than what we used to have. A quiet thoroughfare without carbon pollution may have been better to have one's house beside than a blacktopped highway for semis, but thousands would miss the possibilities available if they could travel fifty miles in a day as we can without thinking about it.

If there is more artistry in a medieval manuscript than in a desktop-produced brochure, it isn't necessarily true that every word on a printed page is worthless because it's new. The best literature of today doubtless owes as much to ancient texts and turn of the century styles as computer programming owes to Pythagoras or Einstein. That's not an argument against its present value.

It's not a cop-out to look ahead and try not to be obsessed by what has gone and can't be recalled; it's a way to make a day worth living. Not many can claim to know when the last of those days will be for them. There seems something foolish about trying to move through even a day without looking ahead. I'd be afraid of running straight (perhaps fatally) into an avoidable stone wall (I live in New England) or over a cliff and losing tomorrows I don't yet want to miss.

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Looking the Wrong Way: People Determined to Make the Past the Single Measure of the Present

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