By Mark Griswold | FāVS News Columnist
All of it’s true. Some of it really happened
At that moment and in the moments to come — for how long, I didn’t know — I needed to live in the past. I needed to live in the past so that I might find the fortitude to face an uncertain future.
What I didn’t know at present, and what I may never know, is that the past is just as uncertain as what is to come, perhaps even more so.
We may write our own futures — sometimes with a surplus of audacity and sometimes with a deficit of faith — but the past, too often, lives in a place of regret, a story we continue to rewrite but never seem to master.
As existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard stated, “Life can only be understood backward; but it must be lived forwards.”
When the past comes knocking
A man from the past resurfaced this week, and along with him memories I’d long forgotten. In remembering those days, now more than half a lifetime ago, what I remember is what Joan Didion called in her “The White Album” collection of essays a “shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.”
All I can recall are what St. Augustine called the “fields and spacious palaces of my memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by the senses.” Memories are just as much fiction as they are fact.
We are told not to lie from an early age. From a moral perspective, this is wise advice for both society and soul, but for those who need more than a biblical primer on morality, another reason is given, one born of practicality and self-interest. We are told not to lie lest we become entangled in the complexities of our falsehoods. We are told it is much easier to remember a single truth than a myriad of lies.
But memories fade like the colors of a dress left too long in the sun. The ones we think we will recall the clearest, the high definition, surround sound experiences, seem to wither away all the more quickly so that we’re left not with the memory, but a memory of the memory.
The fiction we remember best
Was it the hot air balloon ride we took over the winery we remember, or just a photo we glimpsed, a story that we told, years later? These moments that we wish we could feel again in all their fullness and glory are relegated to dusty frames of patinaed prints and the fragile pages of weather-worn diaries.
The lies, though, the lies we remember. We remember passages from Winnie the Pooh and stories of tortoises and hares. We remember Captain Kirk proclaiming a mission “to boldly go where no man has gone before,” and the love shared between Romeo and Juliet. We can recite the lyrics to “California Girls” and whistle along, long after “The Andy Griffith Show” has disappeared from the airwaves. These mean nothing to us in a personal sense. They are all a fiction, yet they have engrained themselves as a form of truth in our minds.
We remember facts and figures from other people’s lives, baseball stats and battle dates, but they’re not our truths. Truly, would any of us remember our own birthdays if our mothers weren’t there to tell us we’d been born? No one remembers their actual birth day and perhaps for good reason.
It would likely be too painful, too traumatic, to relive that “first death” as we left the comfort of a dark womb for a blinding light of what is a harsher world and a death yet to come, a death that, although it remains before us, we recall ever more clearly through visions of our future, ponderances on our fate. We anticipate that time, we hope years in the future, when we look back on the journey we’ve made and hope we remember half of it.
The stories we tell ourselves
But what will we remember? Beyond the details of someone else’s existence, that which will remain most clearly, and perhaps aggravatingly, in our minds are the moments that didn’t happen or the ones we wish had happened differently. We will remember most clearly the alternative realities — the fictions, the lies — we tell ourselves.
We will remember the moments when only our wits rescued us or led to our downfall when they were lacking at a key moment. We will remember the embarrassments and missteps, the things we shouldn’t have said but did or the things we didn’t say but should have. We will remember when our actions led to consequences we wish we could rewrite.
Yes, we will remember faint whispers of things that were true as well — the electrifying touch of a first kiss or the paternal pride of a son’s first hit on the baseball diamond. We will remember the rhythm of mornings spent brewing coffee and flipping pancakes.
We will remember the trees that have counted the greater rhythm of the seasons long before we arrived and will do so long after we have gone, from their budding branches of spring to their lush green leaves of summer, to the brilliant hues of gold and yellow in autumn and the snow-covered bareness of winter, then back again to spring.
We will remember with a vividness reserved for the great works of Monet mostly what we now call dull, while those moments that were brightest as they were lived will fade away.
Living in full color
Perhaps this is as it should be. If all the “best” moments of our lives, bungee jumping off the Verzasca Dam and dining on a five-course dinner in the 700-year-old Italian castle (on the same day, no less); enjoying a romantic evening, gazing out at the sunset above the Pacific and behind the Parroquia de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe while being serenaded by a trio of violinists; even the time that time itself stood still as our Mercedes was surrounded by a mob on the streets of Fez, every window around us broken and our lives brought close enough to death that we could taste the angels’ tears; if all these moments were remembered in full color — as well as taste, smell, sight, and sound — we might not be as prone to pursue the next adventure, instead living nothing but the monochromed mundane, a life of quiet desperation
And for those who may never pursue the reality of a life lived to the fullest, we may still imagine that life through our stories, for, even though they may be a garment woven from a single thread of truth, the half-imagined tales we tell ourselves, be they to make sense or our current station in life or to strive toward the next one, those tales can oftentimes be far more interesting than the truth.
All of it’s true. Some of it really happened.
Never miss a story. Get the top headlines, breaking news, commentaries, and handpicked favorites delivered straight to your inbox every morning. Subscribe to our quick, free and informative FāVS News Daily Newsletter.
