“The past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past…. That is why we dwell on the past, I think.”-- Virginia Woolf –
Have a great Thursday!
Do you really think so? Who am I to argue with Virginia, but it seems to me that if I think fondly on the past it is because the emotion is filtered and mellowed and less intense than those overwhelming feelings of the moment. Time has a way of smoothing over the sharp edges of emotion-the Now is "in your face" rough-just like time healing wounds and the pain of loss.
ReplyDeleteI don't know, but it seems to me that both Woolf and Cleo think that the essence of an emotion can actually be captured, measured. I guess I feel that our grasp of an emotion is slippery, at best.
ReplyDeleteIt's like saying you understand a childhood experience better through an adult's perspective - from the vantage point of distance that time allows - but is this true?
You may feel you understand it "better" as an adult, but can you ever truly rekindle the context of the emotion as it affected you at the time? Not only are we in a nebulous realm of subjective responses, but too much has happened to us in the interim.
Maybe you can't, as Thomas Wolfe said, go home again. Too much mess has happened in between to have that "pure" emotion take place through memory.
But it can, as Woolf suggests, be "beautiful" as it reappears in the haze of memory. And this may mean that it becomes less sharp or moreso through "expansion."
Interesting discussion potential here.
Love the quote (is it from her Sketches of the Past?) You are always enjoyable reading, Cipriano.
Seeing...by the way...is classic Saramago. Somewhat of a fable for America today.
Cleo and Anonymous, I placed this quote here on Splash because I knew there are so many ways to look at it. I think it is something, as you say Anonymous, that can really engender discussion.
ReplyDeleteMy own take on it, is that I really like memories.
I am about as nostalgic as a human being can be. And not about "eras" and things that I had no part in [even though I am sort of nostalgic about the '50's... having never been alive in them]... but moreso I mean, as regards my own life. It helps that a lot of my early memories are good ones, distinctive only in their sort of non-eventfulness.
Relatively quiet, small-town, cohesive-family, peaceful times.
I agree with Cleo that time filters and mellows [de-intensifies] our memories, and I agree with Anonymous [and Thomas Wolfe] that you can't really "go back home again"... it is difficult to truly rekindle emotions... [hence, the difficulty in a lot of psychoanalysis procedures].... time separates... even the pain of a severed arm will leave us, as time "heals".
I believe that whether it is in the present tense or in the past, the only way we can really "understand" our emotions is if we are able to distance ourselves from their "effects" long enough to make a rational choice about them.
This emotion is asking me to feel something.
Should I feel it?
Should I have ought to have felt it, as I did, when I did?
In other words, if I no longer "feel" it [experience it emotively] can I at least differentiate between the two possibilities of it being, at that time, [at the time of its initial occurrence] beneficial or detrimental?
Memorable?
Forgettable?
If the answer is unclear, I need only ask myself if I would like to re-experience it?
Then, this is where memory can be so useful.
It allows us [I think] to re-experience... always to a lesser degree, yes... but, oh how important that "lesser degree" is.
Because, were it not for "memory" we would experience NOTHING. Why? Because as soon as it happened, it would be over. We would be pure present-tense.
[This by the way, is why I believe that God does not EXPERIENCE things as we do. For God is PURE present-tense. Everything is NOW, with God. You have no need for "memory" when you equally know what is going to happen NEXT as you know what happened LAST. Different topic, altogether..... I should leave that....]
Suffice it to say..... yes.... good discussion topic.