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February 28, 2007
Last Lecture
A fourteen year old girl living in Honeoye Falls is said to be the first person born without any inkling of the idea of history. Irene Dayton, who lives on Briar Patch Lane, may be the first of a new generation. This girl was discovered by my friend, former weatherman and helicopter pilot James J. McCarthy, who got into a conversation with Irene, and noticed that she had no idea why some houses in the city of Rochester had no garages. And she grew incredibly bored and exasperated when an explanation was offered--the historical explanation, of course, that these houses were built before there were cars! She just looked at him blankly, and said “huh?”
Oh my God, McCarthy thought, it has finally happened. A person born who is lacking the instinctive thought of the past, and therefore the capability of reflection which, in the rest of us older folks, leads to the inevitable conclusion.
For this much had already been established, in these Lectures which are now sadly, I mean triumphantly, drawing to a close; that the past is an idea that creates a category which, looking around and reading books and going to museums, etc. the world provided ample evidence for. But--and I am rushing this--the evidence alone is mute and out of context without the prior idea of the category. This I and McCarthy knew, and had often labored to make clear, I in my writing and he in his many careers as pilot, traveller and raconteur. But we also knew that just insofar as this is an IDEA a person has, there could be a person, or egads! a whole generation, born without the capacity for such an idea. It is, though described as instinctual, not necessarily given. To make a poor analogy, it could become like the appendix. Or more corrected, this idea of the past would have to classed among miraculous notions, ideas of truth, leading to religion--but it is clear that people in the past have had the idea of the past. And that there are still people, who have it.
But here is a girl who doesn’t understand why houses have no garages; and is not interested in the explanation! She would just as soon see those houses taken away. They are anomalies. So this is not that she lacks an appreciation of the past; appreciation is relative, among people who know the past at least happened. But, again, just having happened is not enough to establish the past. It has to be conceived of first, say by a child in the yard looking at trees.
For of course if the past arises in consciousness as a thought and then shines its light on the then apparently obvious age of things in the world, and enables a person to read books with a prior understanding that they are surviving from a former time, and are talking about this past, then I suppose it is possible that there could be a person who DOESN’T have this thought. In which person’s case then everything old would be simply inexplicable, out of the question, useless, a mistake, made by barbarians.
For again, one cannot infer the past from evidence, one has to know it existed to interpret the evidence. And this is not a relative function that applies only to some aspects of the past, but it is absolute. It is the fundamental category that is most vital for a person’s ability to comprehend the details. And the fact is that while McCarthy and I have long asserted this truth, very few have acknowledged it; most seem to have lived through it, so to speak, and become overwhelmed by their education into thinking the past is there just because time has passed. But anyway, before this girl, all have demonstrated that it, this past, was still operating. Now, what is going to happen, if all the pretty girls like this are part of a quietly invading army of ignorami--
And now I have said too much. This is the last post of Mortimer Shy.
Posted by mortimer at February 28, 2007 02:11 PM