Beware the Past

I started writing memories and diaries a few years ago after my mum started with her dementia, it spooked me out that things I took for granted, like memories, could fade or even be wiped out. I'm going to be digging them out and post them up here so that someone, invisibly, without me knowing, can read them and know that I really am a sad and lonely middle aged man on the cusp of the slippery slope. If I can share my sadness with just one other in this universe then I'll be a happier man....

As for the danger of the past, I'll throw one of my favorite things at you.

American Author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, circa 1856 :
On two separate occasions he went to see the Elgin marbles and the Assyrian and Egyptian statuary at the British Museum. Both times his thought recurred to the theme of the domination of the past as fused in the architectural symbol. "I wished," he wrote after the first visit, "that the whole Past might be swept away, and each generation compelled to bury and destroy whatever it had produced. . . . When we quit a house, we are expected to make it clean for the next occupant. . . . Seeing them again six months later be found him self wishing that the marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon itself "were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into building stones. . . . "The present is burdened too much with the past. We have not time, in our earthly existence, to appreciate what is warm with life, and immediately around us, yet we heap up all these old shells, out of which human life has long emerged, casting them off forever. I do not see how future ages are to stagger onward under all this dead weight, with the additions that will continually be made to it."

He may have been drunk at the time........

I've been guilty of looking back and fathoming all sorts of distinct futures for myself, people I've known, family etc etc. I find that a lot of people do the same, and it never improves anything. The one truth is that life takes a serial form, unwrapping itself backwards from the end point and we can run as many times back to the start point in our minds but never change a moment of it. That's why guilt and regret are such strange emotions when applied to past actions. As I always say to people, the Piano is already falling.

If you've had enough alchohol to think that last paragraph makes sense then welcome to my world, Oh beings of black light.......