What You Do Today Changes Who You Were Yesterday
We can choose a different life.
‘Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.’
So run the first five lines of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, a work of such outstanding depth and beauty that some read it as scripture. In the opening, the poet suggests that time may not be just a series of moments, but happening simultaneously: each ‘part’ — past, present and future — containing every other. He asserts a non-linear conception of time, of the kind proposed by ancient wisdom and implied by modern physics. If this is true, he wonders, is time unredeemable, that is to say, is everything predetermined?
The poet suggests that time may not be just a series of moments, but happening simultaneously.
Perhaps you, lovely reader, feel a certain degree of remorse about some of the things you have done in the course of your life. Perhaps not. I will not bore you with the details, but I live with a great deal of regret, and though I am very thankful for what I have (partner, cats, a truly fabulous shoe collection), and though—moreover—I know if anything in my life had gone differently I might not have it, I still ponder those moments when I feel I let myself or others down, and wish that I could change them.
But in a sense, I can change the past through my actions in the present, and so can you. As Eliot writes in his essay on criticism, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, the artist who is shaped by her tradition also shapes that tradition in turn, by adding to the context in which that tradition and its parts are understood. In other words, what the artist changes is the frame of reference only by relation to which the art within it can be understood. Her work therefore changes our conception of the work that came before her, and since all experience is part-perception, part-reality, how we conceive of things radically alters their meaning.
An example, perhaps: the Renaissance period, sparked off by Byzantine-Greek scholars fleeing to Italy with the classical texts of Plato, Aristotle, Sophocles and others transformed the classical period into a prefiguration of the Renaissance in the public consciousness. Those texts had been forgotten following the fall of Rome. By informing the thinkers and doers of the Renaissance, a connection and a tradition was made. Renaissance artists, architects, writers and philosophers idealised classical antiquity, transforming it into the embryo and basis of their own burgeoning culture. In the modern (or post-modern) period, we see that period of cultural flourishing in Europe as the product of a fusion of Athens and Jerusalem, of the Classical and the Christian. The present changes the past.
Renaissance artists idealised classical antiquity, transforming it into the embryo and basis of their own burgeoning culture.
And so it is with ourselves. The career criminal who, on his release from jail (let’s face it: it is probably a he), counsels young offenders to leave the path they are on radically changes his life story to one of redemption and growth. Had he continued to commit crime, he would have remained the villain he always had been: an incurable wrongdoer who started young and continued down the path of criminality. Instead, thanks to his decision to use his experience of doing bad to relate to and guide younger people, his own younger self becomes someone different: someone who had the seeds of decency planted within them and who, with reflection and effort, could learn to water those seeds and blossom into someone good.
In similar fashion, the bully, the liar, the cheat — these people can become something else here and now, and so become someone different then as well. Our desire for consistency and coherence too often makes us feel that we are in some way bound to continue to walk down whatever path we started down—that it is better for us to be ‘true’ to who we were than to make the changes we know, deep down, we ought to make. But if we do make those changes, we can change the idea of who we were—for our past selves, like all memories, are, in the end, only ideas—and so transform ourselves into people who lived, erred and learned: who grew from experience, who redeemed ourselves, and who, by our own free will, chose a different life.
