The Agony of Remembrance

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”
William Faulkner, “Requiem for a Nun”, 1951.

A perennial favorite in expatriates’ discussion is “the old country”. When it comes to the land that gave us birth, a gentle golden halo surrounds and colors our memories, making the present that much more painful and cruel. I have never been to an expatriate gathering that did not include a discussion of how things are in the old country. Usually this discussion follows the predictable pattern of either enumerating all the things wrong with the land of your birth, prefaced by a mention of the latest atrocity, bombing, sectarian violence or gang rape incident or a long list of things commendable back home and missing here in the Godless, secular West. The stated or unstated longing to be ‘back home’ is thus indulged or rejected or both, depending on the mood of the gathering.

Of course, the obvious fallacy of this approach is never questioned. What most of us long to return to is not the land of our birth, per se. It is instead, that mystical, magical place where our memories were formed, that time when we were blissfully unaware of adult responsibilities and burdens.

In his seminal essay, “A Free Man’s Worship”, Bertrand Russell put it thus:

“This is the reason why the Past has such magical power. The beauty of its motionless and silent pictures is like the enchanted purity of late autumn, when the leaves, though one breath would make them fall, still glow against the sky in golden glory. The Past does not change or strive; like Duncan, after life’s fitful fever it sleeps well; what was eager and grasping, what was petty and transitory, has faded away, the things that were beautiful and eternal shine out of it like stars in the night. Its beauty, to a soul not worthy of it, is unendurable”

This also is a core tenet of Freudian psychology (or more properly Psychoanalysis), which states that a person’s conscious thoughts, feelings and actions at any one time are but a thin layer of perception on the vast storehouse of emotions, impulses and desires that is the all-encompassing “unconscious”.
For Freud, the unconscious was a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of mind by the mechanism of psychological repression. While past thoughts and memories may be deleted from immediate consciousness, they direct the thoughts and feelings of the individual from the realm of the unconscious. In classical psychoanalytic thought, the unconscious is the real ‘engine’ behind human thoughts, feelings and behavior and thus is the most fertile avenue of exploration during psychotherapy.

Another feature of the unconscious is that, like the past, it is evergreen, it is never really past. In other words, the shame, the guilt, the anger, or other feelings that one experienced as a child or an adolescent are never far away. Even if they happened decades ago, as far as the unconscious is concerned, they may have happened yesterday or even a few minutes ago. In that sense, the unconscious, like dreams, does not follow the rules of logic and rationality. In fact, dreams are often a reflection of the turmoil in the unconscious mind, something that led to Freud calling them ‘the royal road to the unconscious’. In Psychoanalytic psychotherapy, dreams are considered an integral part of unmasking the feelings residing in the unconscious mind.

This longing for the ideal, unblemished utopia is also the reason behind a common myth, that of the ‘good old days’. A gathering of senior citizens would be incomplete without a recounting of the how good things were, ‘back then’. It is usually accompanied by a litany of complaints against the youth of today; how they have become immoral and irreligious, how bad things are regarding everything: crime, inflation, pollution, political uncertainty, war etc. Some writers and intellectuals of our age, impressed with this myth, claim that human progress itself is a myth and that mankind is doomed, its future bleak. Popular cultures including movies, books and TV shows reinforce this mindset. The obvious conclusion is, of course, that progress is dangerous, that we should all look backward to a supposed ‘Golden Past’ for inspiration. This is the ruling philosophy of terrorist groups like Al-Qaida and various Christian, Jewish and Hindu apocalyptic sects.

Of course, like all myths, the myth of the “Golden Past” too, falls apart upon closer inspection. This desire to return to ‘never-never land’ is as futile as it is foolish.

First, to restate the obvious, the past was never golden. It only appears so because, as Russell put it so eloquently, what was ‘petty and grasping’ has faded away. In addition, looking back from the perspective of the present, one only sees the things one cannot find in the present, overlooking the fact that many of things one takes for granted today were unheard of in the distant or even the near past. Seniors may reminisce about bread that cost 2 paisas for a loaf or gasoline at 1 rupee a gallon overlooking the fact that not many people had a car to put gasoline in, or that nobody had air-conditioners or televisions or stereos or telephones or computers and so on.

In the words of the Greek philosopher Epicurus “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things only hoped for.”

In contemporary Psychology, this would be referred to as a focus on the ‘here and now’. It is also a central feature of the Buddhist philosophy of ‘mindfulness’, the technique in which a person focuses on his or her present moment, intentionally excluding all thoughts of past regret and future fear.

In fact, one can argue that this is the only true path to happiness. It may sound like a cliché but being thankful for what you have right now is the only antidote to the longing for the good old days.

Only if one can cultivate that thankfulness, the quality that Allama Iqbal referred to as “Istighna”, can one stop saying:

Yaad-maazee azaab hai yaaRab
Cheen lay mujh say hafiza mera

(Remembrance of the past is agony, my Lord
Seize from me my memories)