“Those who do not know the past are doomed to repeat it.”
But rest assured, Dear Reader: It is no part of our purpose here to paralyze you with platitudes.
The fine example shown above has been attributed to Winston Churchill, George Santayana, Edward Gibbon, and Mickey Mouse.
Just kidding. Nobody ever attributed it to Edward Gibbon. The best candidate is Santayana, a Spanish philosopher, who in 1905 wrote:
. . . when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
Santayana could not have meant that literally—at least, not in detail. For example, there will never be another Robespierre. Yet over the years, any number of Robespierre avatars have goaded their nations downward, in circumstances reminiscent of the French Revolution.
Maybe that’s what Mark Twain—or was it Theodore Reik?—meant when he said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.”
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Ah, Fair Reader, what Gordian knots of human concern attend the passage of Time!
Consider Time’s chapters: past, present, and future.
One night long ago, Your New Favorite Writer happened on a passage in Huai-nan Tzu, a Taoist text, that made him think of a rug being unrolled. The part already unrolled, lying flat and thus fit for examination, is the past; the part still wound in a tight coil, impenetrable, is the future. Exactly which part is the present I cannot say.
Caveat: If you search through Huai-nan Tzu for this rolled-rug metaphor, you won’t find it. It’s only an image in one reader’s mind, which was triggered by some obscure Chinese phrase describing the way events flow through their course.
I was about thirty years old at the time, and impressionable. Since then, I’ve seen the past as actualized, whereas all the contents of the future are merely potential. The past is real, whereas the future is theoretical.
Gracious Reader, if you grew up in the same Modern Western Civilization where I did, you may envision past, present, and future as a giant map over which we are creeping, making our way toward what is already there but we haven’t encountered it yet. This is the basis of all time travel stories: There is a future somewhere that already exists, a place you might get to through a newly-developed mechanism or a wrinkle in the fabric of the Time-Space Continuum.
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Well, it turns out that Huai-nan Tzu didn’t know the half of it. The latest version of physics calls into question whether Time itself is real. Isn’t it, rather, just something that happens as a result of unprecedented events, like the Big Bang? No Time, no Space—but everything explodes, and by some interaction of matter, gravity, and the Quantum Field—Time and Space are bent into being. And they’ve been hurtling outward ever since.
One might imagine the starry cosmos to be a visible record of the past, constantly receding into an inconceivable void where the future might be said to reside—if, for example, the future had to list its place of residence on a form to get its Real ID-compliant driver’s license.
Your New Favorite Writer is hardly one of those who believe a thing is true because somebody called a scientist said it. But Time fabricated by the unfolding of real events has a certain attractiveness to it.
In that kind of Time, the past is not just a dusty page upon which a moving finger has writ. Rather, the past is woven through everything I or my ancestors, human and otherwise, have ever done or experienced.
I can’t know what will happen next year, or tomorrow, or five minutes from now. But I am free to search out and ponder all the curlicues and lateral arabesques of any and all events that have happened.
Maybe that’s why I write historical fiction. I don’t know what my ancestors, or other people’s ancestors, went through that caused mid-19th-century America to fight with itself, and conquer itself, over the question of slavery. But I had a kind of notion, based on a real acquaintance with historical facts, and I wrote that notion in an imaginary way until it became The Price of Passage, a novel about Norwegian immigrant farmers and fugitive African American slaves. It’s not factual, but it’s plausible. The tiny details are factual, the great movements are made up. In a strange way, time has been re-bent to serve my narrative purpose. Try it, you might like it.
Likewise, I took things that I really, personally knew, from my very own childhood experiences, and invented a story called Izzy Strikes Gold! It’s about a 12-year-old boy struggling to find his way through the problematic year 1957. All the details are real, but the lives of the characters do not exactly match the actual lives of anyone I ever knew.
But that’s okay. God has made billions of people, each with an individual story. If I add a few more to the pot, I don’t suppose it will hurt anything. There will just be a few more stories. Time and space will have been bent to new and interesting purposes in the realm of the imagination.
Rod Serling would approve.
Right now I’m working on a World War II novel, in which two brothers from a small Midwestern town wind up in the Southwest Pacific, the continent of Africa, and other places to fight the Axis Powers and their own demons, which arise from their troubled relationship. You won’t want to miss it, but it’s only halfway done, so you won’t be able to read it for a while. In the meantime, Dear Reader, knock yourself out on the Price of Passage and Izzy Strikes Gold!
Until next time,
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
