Sometimes chance brings us back to a place and time in our lives that we left decades ago. Maybe a funeral notice, a school reunion, or just a fortuitous turn in the road reunites us with people and a place that we left long ago. And if things have changed little enough, the effect is like traveling to the past. We return after a long absence to be reunited with people as they have since become and as you yourself would have likely resembled had fate not borne you elsewhere.
Some have argued that we can return to the past just as it was, with ourselves just as we were. Who can forget the opening lines of Richard Llewelyn’s How Green Was My Valley?
“I am packing my belongings in the shawl my mother used to wear when she went to the market. And I’m going from my valley. And this time I shall never return. I am leaving behind me 50 years of memory. Memory. Streams that the mind will forget so much of what only this moment has passed, and yet hold clear and bright the memory of what happened years ago — of men and women long since dead. Yet who shall say what is real and what is not? Can I believe my friends all gone when their voices are a glory in my ears? No. And I will stand to say no and no again, for they remain a living truth within my mind. There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember.”
The contrasting view was advanced by LP Hartley in the Go Between. Memory is a cheat. “To see things as they really were—what an empoverishment!” His classic opening is an indictment. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
Inevitably, you will return – at least for a while – as two people: the first, what you have become; and the second, as how you were remembered. People at reunions remember you as last seen. You cannot go back into the past without first being haunted by the man that you once were. That doppelganger will be with you in a kind of superposition, suffusing everything with ambiguity until the remembered past is finally re-absorbed into the present.
You as a visitor to the Green Valley may see the sequel to dramas you had left behind. Perhaps over there is the place where you could never afford to eat, though you might not want to eat there now. Maybe standing across the street beside a man you vaguely remember is the girl you once wanted to marry. And most incongruous of all, here you are, a disappointment to those who hoped for great things from you but a surprise to those who were sure you would come to a bad end.
You leave the dramas as they are — unfinished. But from this temporary bifurcated state, you may start to wonder what “forever” could ever possibly mean in a human existence. Did you betray that pledge of love to a girl who didn’t want to marry you when you made a vow to the girl you actually did? Was one as good as the other, and if so, was your journey through the maze really so random? The half-remembered lines might come unbidden to your thoughts:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth
Then took the other.
Maybe there is an infinite number of possible forevers depending on the choices we make at each moment. There could be one forever to that girl you might have married and another with the one you did, depending on which branch in the road you took. It might even be true that, in the Mind of God, everything that could have happened actually does, as the Quantum Multiverse theory of reality argues. Reunions and returns are opportune times for reflection. The return to an approximation of a past might provide a psychological experiment to consider how an alternative pathway might have played out, a reconnaissance that, alas, no human consciousness has ever been able to undertake.
But promises are often contingent, and your many possible selves must have responded according to circumstances. To keep your identity in the Quantum Multiverse whole, there still remains the possibility that, by trying to be true to whatever path we find, in an effort to be the same in essence before the changing circumstances, it may be that at the Last Judgment, God will find someone definite to judge instead of a cipher.
The present has a certain thickness. Besides the moment itself are the memories of events immediately preceding and attitudes long formed. Without that thickness, there would be no context, and we would all be like men stricken with dementia, unable to recall where we lived, at a loss to explain why we did things, unable even to say why we loved and what forever means to us. What gives us constancy and agency is the context we carry in our hearts, through every pathway. Though people say that we only live in the immediate present, all except for the most superficial live with a thickness that defines us. When we return for the funeral, the wedding, or the reunion, we do not come for the moment alone; we bring along our depth. We come with the feeling of that shawl mother used to wear when she went to the market. We come hearing the voices long since dead. We return not to live in the past, but to continue it. And perhaps, for a moment, we cross universes. In considering the matter, Thornton Wilder spoke not of a valley but a bridge.
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below. This bridge was on the highroad between Lima and Cuzco and hundreds of persons passed over it every day. It had been woven of osier by the Incas more than a century before and visitors to the city were always led out to see it. … The bridge seemed to be among the things that last forever; it was unthinkable that it should break.
In the aftermath of the accident, what perplexed many was why those five should die and not someone else. Their virtue, social status, the urgency of their errand — all seemed irrelevant to their demise. The narrator in Wilder’s story continues:
But where are sufficient books to contain the events that would not have been the same without the fall of the bridge? From such a number I choose one more.
That “one more” concerned a relative of one who died on the bridge and came to seek an explanation from an abbess who knew the victim, seeking some reason for the unfulfilled journey of that life — some judgment, some accolade, or some secret that would make it all clear. But she received none. All the abbess would say was that life continued, that God’s sole reply was the dawning of another morning.
“All, all of us have failed. One wishes to be punished. One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love—I scarcely dare say it—but in love our very mistakes don’t seem to be able to last long?”
“Now learn,” she commanded herself, “learn at last that anywhere you may expect grace.”
Perhaps the quality of love in our universe is measured in units of constance and the faith to endure surprise.
“Even now,” she thought, “almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
The moment passes, but the thickness endures.
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