As we are beginning to recover from the events of Sept. 11, life is different but unchanged. I have this mental picture of America now, men and women in high-fashion gas masks, dressed in their formal wear. There is fear, but there is life. We have returned to not quite normal.
Yet, for all of the lessons of our experience, America has changed little beyond the surface.
For a few days, we stayed close to home, proclaimed “I love you” until we believed it, and went to church (perhaps for the first time or the first time in a long time); as if these minor acts of penance could forgive our complacency in times past.
As the months go by, though, we will forget. Events will fade; become abstracts; abstracts subject to engines of memory – bitterness, nostalgia, fear, anger, joy and awe.
Memories are flavored, and over time our tastes change.
Memories are transient; coming and going, often in the night like thieves or unloved relatives.
Even what one would think would be the potent memories in life, like when a loved one has moved away or died, are only bookmarks in a long, eventful life.
As moments give way to months, we fight to keep the memories alive, but inevitably all things slip into the inky blackness of things forgotten.
It is the cycle of life, for all things pass away, and even photographs begin to look like strangers.
This atrophic burial is memory’s showcase at its cruelest and most kind.
For it is cruel to know that as things return to dust, we cannot keep in our minds the faces of those we love.
Our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives and children all pass in to what was. This is the nature of existence.
Yet, with this apparent cruelty comes the one and only gift of time, a chance to learn from where we’ve been. Hindsight is 20/20, for time brings objectivity.
Time does not heal wounds it merely drains the freshness and proximity of pain. It gives us a chance to consider our past, benumbed, to see ourselves through someone else’s eyes.
Even though this is the time to learn to appreciate the past, ironically, this natural erosion causes guilt in many people. They think, “If we can’t remember, did we ever really love them; did we care? Surely if we were a good and decent people we would not forget.”
They say these things, piling feelings of failure on a sour grave of grief, which they lock within the recess of their mortuary of the mind.
Yet absence always makes the mind go yonder and it is not that we are not good, not earnest, in our desire to hold on to memories.
The truth of the matter is, we are human. It is a fact that one cannot repair a wound in which the weapon is still lodged, and time is our anesthesia.
It is this slow disconnection with history that allows us to move forward and to keep the past in its proper place, a place of reverence and consideration, not of possession or dominance of oneself.
For even though it may appear to loom, the past is as much a part of the present as the future is.
Indeed, the only things that are true are those which have passed. For the present is the point where past and future meet.
There most assuredly is a “now,” but even as you read every word in this column there is a word before and another after, as with life and time, and it is not the presence but the movement that is the definition.
There is no escape, and even as we think we can run or hide from the past, it is always right behind us.
The past is the present is the future, all at once and yet separate. The past has come, the past is now and the past is coming.
The past that has come is the truth, for we cannot return and change what has been. Even as I write these words, they become part of things past.
For even if I erase them, in the truth of history I cannot unwrite them. They can merely be changed. Much as man himself, I should like to think.
The only truth is past, the only constant is change and the future is fleeting.
Time is distance, movement, a constant, a cycle in which all things take their turn, and no one is exempt.
Everything that exists is subject to time. It is the one measurement, the one tabulation, from which nothing quantifiable can escape.
As such, history is a conceit of the living in the present to preserve themselves for the future and, as we move forward, we make monuments and documents thinking that these will suffice in the place of human “recollection.”
But all monuments are works of art without meaning meant for future generations.
How many of us see a Revolutionary War monument and remember the struggle for independence America was part of? We weren’t there, so the meaning is less if not lost.
But when events like Sept. 11 occur, we suddenly understand, and the past comes to bear its dreadful weight upon us, a burning epiphany.
Yet, if those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, then those who live in the past are doomed to never move forward.
For time is the measurement of existence. Existence is the first measure of man.
Man is a name for self-awareness, an awareness of time. Time is aware of itself. It is complete in its existence, a beginning and an ending, existing all at once, a singularity in which all things are contained.
Beginning and ending, Alpha and Omega, the cycle, the completeness, the truth.
Man is time incarnate.

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