The Past

We recreate the past as something new: in novels, plays, video games. Sometimes it is a literal recreation of the past, sometimes it is an imagined future modeled on the past. We judge today against a pretended yesterday, and wish for good old days. Spenser took his world, one of Calvinists and Catholics, dressed it up in knights and dragons and casltes, and called it history. Virgil looked to a fallen nation to tell the story of a rising empire. One myth about human creation wasn't enough for ovid; he needed two.

The past is not a thing that once was, and its stories are not inflexible because they've already happened. The past is the newest, most important news, and going backwards in time is the smartest place to look for the next step forward. We don't dream up the past arbitrarily; we grow it, water it. The present is not a point on a line, but a branch on a living tree. The roots then bring the substance to flowers now.

Our age is one which mistrusts tradition. It is suspicious of the old and rooted. There is some good to that, for progression cannot have a fixation on the past. But institutions of the past link us to the soil of history that feeds new thought. Look at the most creative, original minds: their brains are fevered, more often than not, with something brilliantly ancient. We cannot discard the past or its influences anymore than our heads can discard our feet and knees. We mustn't stare dumbly at our feet, though, in wonderment of their design. We get new shoes, we go to foot doctors, so that we can better use our body's foundation. Just as we don't ignore our limbs for the sake of better movement, we must never ignore the stories of history, tradition and imagination with the illusion that this will better humanity.