Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the ‘manifesto’ of the week. These are an attempt to, however gently, nudge the world in one direction or another. At , has a moving personal essay discussing Christian Nationalism.
Best,
Sam
ON LIVING IN THE PAST
A while ago I was listening to an NPR program about a couple who had decided to live in a log cabin or something — annoyingly, I can’t remember any of the search terms. They were very militant about what they were doing and getting increasingly annoyed with the reporter’s questions. I can remember distinctly the way one of them started suddenly shouting at the reporter, “You don’t have to live in the present, you don’t have to live in the present,” and then refused to let the reporter give some flippant reply. “But do you understand the concept?” the past-dweller kept saying. In voiceover, the reporter summarized, “I said that I did but it seemed far-fetched to me.”
Everything about the reporter’s voice suggested that this was the craziest thing he had ever heard, but, actually, it made sense to me. I wasn’t as extreme about it, but I had grown up with a strong sense of history — reading history had always been escapism for me, but it was more than that. I felt that the past was everywhere, that we were an extension of it, and interwoven with it constantly.
As I traveled more, I had a greater sense that other cultures took this interweaving with the past pretty much for granted, that the present itself could sometimes be a fuzzy concept, and that the Western focus on the present, on the ‘modern,’ the ‘contemporary,’ was the mode of thought that was anomalous. This was easily enough glimpsed in the architecture of European and Middle Eastern cities, in the overlay of centuries. More interesting was the heightened sense of ritual, and the presence of ancestors, when I spent time in Africa — the very strong sense that the community was suspended between past and present, that the ancestors had to be consulted with for any decision the community made.
As far as I could tell — this was true in Gabon, as it had been true in Japan for a very long time — it was completely possible to live in the past, to view the ostensible ‘present’ like it was some kind of traveling circus that had its entertainment value but no particular psychological hold. At the end of an all-night ceremony in Gabon, the leader shouted triumphantly, “This is the traditional way.” He made that sound exciting, and it was. It wasn’t exactly conservative or reactionary, the present just didn’t really enter into it. The past, the spirit of the ancestors, required a real concentration of effort — and, in Gabon, the spiritual leader was proud of the community and of himself for having continued the connection. It was exactly the same spirit as the couple who had chosen to live in the log cabin — except that the Gabonese shaman had a dedicated community behind him and the couple were weirdos shouting at NPR reporters.
It’s part of the project of this Substack — an extension of how I see the world — to take the side of the Gabon all-night ceremony and of the NPR freaks. The sense is that there’s simply too much of an emphasis on the ‘now,’ the ‘in thing,’ that the past is being constantly pulped, and the deck reshuffled. This isn’t some ideological thing — it’s not being politically conservative; it’s also not about being opposed to an ethic of ‘originality’ or the ‘cutting-edge,’ which I find attractive in its own way. It’s just the feeling that we’ve gone too far in that direction, that there’s more pleasure to be had from engagement with the past and a richer sense of self from placing oneself in a position in which past and present inter-cut. As the Jude Law character puts it in The Young Pope, “The past is a treasure house with all sorts of things inside. The present is a narrow slit with room for only one pair of eyes.” In other words, the present is dominated by power and expedience while the past is incomparably richer.
On this Substack, past and present are in closer co-existence than is normal for media. Old books are often side-by-side with new books under the assumption that old books shouldn’t necessarily be mummified the moment the publishers’ catalogs replace themselves. ‘Curator’ is more or less the same thing as ‘Commentator,’ and the two deal largely with the same ideas, although ‘Curator’ tends to focus more on the past. But the consonance of present and past runs deeper than that. The notion is that the two are inextricable. And that there is a source of great beauty — and a path to fulfillment — by not attempting to demarcate between them. We are embedded in the past and our lives constantly become the past. To be genuinely happy — I believe — it is vital to see that as an enrichening development rather than as misfortune.
This may seem trite because it’s so often repeated and slightly misquoted, but here it is: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man.
Great and thought-provoking post, thank you!
I moved to rural Japan when I was 40 to live in a more traditional, tied to the land, sort of way. While there, I discovered several other Westerners like me who had the same notion. They were sprinkled among the mountains in deep valleys, living in ancient farmhouses. None of us lasted more than a few years.
One guy, a Canadian, decamped after the Fukushima meltdown, leaving his dog tied up to his abandoned home. Another guy moved to Germany and joined a cult. I moved back to NYC after three years. I'll never forget the Japanese farmer who just shook his head when we tried to grow things in that terrible soil. "Why would you choose to live like this?" He asked on occasion. For every farmer who loves it, there must be a hundred who hate it. At least that's what I remember thinking after a hot, buggy summer with nothing to show for it.
I think that people who glorify the past are different from the people in the past in one very important way: they are rejecting the present. The people of years past did not reject the present, they lived in it. Unless there were farmers in cabins pretending to be medieval peasants. Maybe there were?
When I tried to live a simpler life, I realized that I was in search of something I called "authenticity." But by leaving everything to pursue a fantasy in a foreign land, I brough myself further from my authentic self than I ever had before. Tradition, custom, and fashion all feel to me like choices that are easily made and unmade. From preppers in their bunkers wearing camoflage and cleaning their guns on Saturday and sitting in church in their Sunday best on Sunday, to hipsters getting inked and office workers wearing suits on weekdays and dayglo fishnets in raves on weekends, we're all just cosplaying through life. Authenticity is a moving target.