Life’s Tapestry: Memory, Time, and Western Expectations
Amputated. What does all that that person has accumulated mean? I do not mean material possessions, the transmission assets which regulate the civil codes. I refer to the repertoire of experiences that each of us treasures: these ways of seeing, of viewing the world, to act upon it.
Each of us is, of course, the son of his time, but we are not merely a case comparable to the rest of our contemporaries. Each of us is unique, and with the death of each one disappears what no one else can resume. Death haunts us, destruction threatens us: those diseases that harm us, these incidents undermine us, and such personal breaks destabilize us, the aging and decrepit that we become unrecognizable. We remember what we have been for a time—we were young, we were strong, we were beautiful even. Moreover, memories are embellished, making us better than they actually were. In the report there is some truth, but these recollections are also reconstructive surgery: we remind anyone better than it actually was. And how do we remember? Telling our own life with thread and with respect, with consistency: so pious and so merciless.
Because it is possible to judge us harshly. The old man may feel nostalgia for the young man who was, or thought to be. But the old man may experience pain for precisely what he did not become, for the bad decisions, projects rejected by cowardice, by paralysis, by personal stupidity. Remember to save us, to haunt, to assess, to be satisfied: the fact is that we remember telling, narrating. Narrating is the means we have to put the pieces of a life together. Not all: only certain parts. Narrating is the instrument with which we have to give general and specific meaning to what has happened and, higher, we evoke. To narrate is to put order to disperse, giving the simultaneous succession; attribute meaning to the incoherent. But not only that. To narrate is to kill time, accelerate or stop it: do as we accelerate the time or stop it.
Western prosperity has disrupted the obvious: we live in a society of expectations, in a space that rewards, in a place of exchange where we expect to prosper fairly. Contrary to what was the historical experience of other times, near the West makes our lives easier. We live in an area of well-founded optimism: the society does not determine, we think, the society does not put insurmountable or inevitable, as happened before.
Time is probably our biggest enigma. In all cultures and, of course, in the West prosperous today. Under normal circumstances, we think of children as a bundle of possibilities and deposited them sensible or exaggerated expectations. We want to think like an eternity that we exceed happily, as beings whose death does not look or contemplate. We think of children as they come: they are receiving the best and the best thing for them is yet to come. With these views we age and with those ideas more or less shared forge us some idea of the world. Us who die We shall not witness the death of the young. Shall we who hurt life: our children, by contrast, mature without damage or laceration.