I have always had a fascination with adventurers, using this word in a non-gender-specific way since a number of the individuals I’m thinking of were women. I recently read the biography of Josiah Harlan (1799-1871), who traveled to
These figures prompted a kind of nostalgic envy in me. In particular, I was envious of their apparent lack of practical fear or anxiety. Having grown up as product of the second world war and living in poverty well into my late twenties, I was myself always preoccupied with practical security, which meant always making the most conservative decisions and avoiding risk. The consequence, however, of my history making me obsessively risk-averse was that risk-taking in others acquired an almost erotic aura for me, making them romantic motivational enigmas. What, I couldn’t ever help asking myself of them, what exotic and amazing thoughts and emotions must be drifting through their wonderfully unencumbered, utterly free minds? Surely, I thought, these people had somehow miraculously escaped the burdens of practicality and planning.
Would Harlan have ever asked himself whether he shouldn’t try for work in a haberdashery (they had those then) rather than risking valuable time and life on a trip to
The answer in all of these cases is an emphatic no! And just as they couldn’t or wouldn’t give up their bohemian, risky lives, so I could never have embarked on an adventurous life of my own. The uncertainty would have made me totally crazy. And so they amazed, puzzled, and enticed me by what seemed to be their inexplicable freedom. But were their inner lives actually as free as my fantasy made them?
Of course, we can’t really know. Salome and Hahn both wrote a good deal, so I suppose one could form conjectures from those writings, but I admit they would hardly count as knowledge.
But I ask the question because I recently made the re-acquaintance of a woman who took on the romantic aura of an adventuress when I was an undergraduate. I won’t describe what it was about her and her life and her choices that made me think of her in this way, since that might serve to identify her, which I don’t want to do. Suffice it to say, I have always remembered her as young (she was, then), fearless, adventurous, and very attractive. Needless to say, I was excited to have “rediscovered” her some 50 years later and was looking forward to being dazzled, to having my youthful romantic image of her validated.
Alas, this was not to be. What I found, sadly, was a lonely woman of around my own age. Of course, she couldn’t help having become old any more than I could. Neither, I suppose, was it her fault that she was lonely. In fact, nothing I found about her could properly be said to be her fault. But interacting with her from the standpoint of almost seven decades of life threw water on the idea that there was anything mysterious or remarkable going on within her mind. A twenty year old faced with a pretty girl is more than willing, say even eager, to attribute to her an extraordinariness she doesn’t possess. And this isn’t her fault at all, it’s just nature’s way of making sure the species continues, whether for good or for ill.
I also found a readiness to anger that wasn’t entirely stable, a vulgarity I would never have expected from one of my romantic adventuress ideals, and a totally surprising lack of rationality. In brief, this woman really failed to live up to my expectations. I can’t and don’t fault her for this, she has no obligation to live up to anyone’s expectations than her own. But I do draw a moral from the entire unappetizing experience. It is this.
We form beliefs inevitably about two regions outside of our immediate experience, the future, but also the past. We call those beliefs about the future “predictions,” but we have no common name for the ones about the past. Some philosophers have coined the word “retrodictions” for those beliefs. What I am interested in here are the retrodictions we think of as autobiographical. I am interested in the beliefs we have about our own pasts.
Now, while predictions are notoriously difficult to make, many of them do have the advantage of ultimately being corrected by reality. “Truth is the daughter of time,” the saying goes, and what it means is that sooner or later we find out what the truth is. Unfortunately, this expedient is not available in any direct way for our retrodictions; reality does not inevitably correct our autobiographical beliefs. This is bad enough, but it gets worse. Because of the fact that there is no mechanical, automatic corrective for false autobiographical beliefs, those beliefs can, and do, gradually change under the pressure of our individual needs and wants.
In general, we tend to improve the people and the events of our pasts, but not necessarily. The point is not that we do precisely this or that, or even that we change our memories at all, it is that simply discovering an alteration is a very difficult and unreliable process in itself.
Yet, there are circumstances in which reality asserts itself even with our distant memories, and re-discovering this old classmate brought this fact to my attention.
Our judgments when we are mature are far more informed and far better than when we were young. Consequently, it is a good exercise to meet with people who were witnesses to our earlier lives and review the ancient (and perhaps altered) perceptions we formed so long ago.
Interacting with this old classmate reminded me that there were forces working on my perceptions at that time that made them less than accurate, a very good thing to realize, after all is said and done.
No comments:
Post a Comment