by Jeffrey Jason Hill

Created on: June 06, 2009   Last Updated: June 08, 2009

"In my life, I felt so self-assured, but suddenly it's all changed...." So begin the words of a famous Gino Vanelli song. It is somewhat maudlin, but the pull of it is irresistible to someone like me who reminisces romantically about the past. There is a great sense in which each of those moments which linger in the memory are forever happening, etched indelibly in the fabric of time and space. The thing I hate the most is the decrepit function of my memory. It is not that I want to stop dwelling on the past. I wish the pictures of them in my mind were clearer!

Eleanor Roosevelt said something once about youth being wonderful because of the lack of experience. No, imagination is what makes up for experience in a child. Once grown, experience takes the room of imagination. How true. When we were younger, imagination trumped experience, and we made ourselves heroes more heroic than any myth in Joseph Campbell's The Man of A Thousand Faces. Imagination of the future was to our youth what reminiscence of the past is to us now as adults. It didn't turn out quite how we expected. In a world of six billion people, there is only so much room.

William Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Leave it to Faulkner to put flesh on my fondest of wishes.

"But all our seasons change, and now I'm not that strong..Cause I am lost, livin' inside myself..." So the rest of the Vanelli song goes. The past has a soundtrack now. Available for a limited time. Why else do we spend time searching for names from our past in Facebook and other websites?

We romanticize the past because in it we were still innocent. The world seemed more secure than it does now. We think of the law of entropy which says the natural order of all things tends to decay. Could it also be true of our lives? Is there some radioactive half-life or particles or photons spreading out from the event horizons of our lives before we dissipate and return to the dust from whence we came? In the past we are triumphant. We may not have always gotten the girl; but sometimes we did. True, there are many humiliating moments from the past. Are we counting on the past to solve our problems? Yes, the original video games like Atari and Coleco were a good thing-and the Rubik's Cube-and the Molly Ringwald movies. But not every Molly Ringwald movie. Not P.K. and the Kid, for instance. Sounds too much like B.J. and the Bear or Hardcastle and McCormick. Speaking of which, why did every other show have a name like that. Kate and Ally? Jake and the Fatman?

The past has a hold on us because life was simpler then. We didn't necessarily think so then; we sure do now.

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