Past and the Phantasms Who Keep It

Recent political events (and I'll admit, some personal regret) often have people comparing present times to the past. "Back then, this happened..." and several post hoc ergo ad hoc fallacies soon follow. It’s easy to reminisce because memory isn’t an accurate recording of the past but a distillation of its highs and lows. Memory, as I’ve read, works best with extremes and exaggerations. You will always have a phrase that contains “outrageous,” “millions,” or any possibly mind-numbing quantitative figure.” Facts, after all, are just boring and can’t quite retain their place in our memories as figures that require careful contemplation to digest.

Even the good Doc discourages nostalgia. “To go back is to go back to all the issues that facilitated the end to begin with, reasons that still exist… The reality is that when you go back, you go back to a dirty slate.” Returning to the past is a manifestation of pride, the sting of a failed conquest that begs resolution.

Yet experience as we know it fortifies itself by the knowledge gained from past experiences. Hindsight is, after all, 20-20. All too tasty is the temptation to return with the knowledge we are equipped with now, often postulating as to how things would have turned out with the knowledge we currently possess. But that, in itself, is a fallacy.

H.G. Wells, himself, confesses that the events that preceded one’s time travel cannot be altered, for without, one could not return to the past in the first place. Thus, the timeline itself will find a way of repairing itself in such a case.

Temporality is composed of so many instances of now, only one of which comes into existence. Physical time travel has already been proven impossible. Metaphysical is another matter entirely.

The past itself is ruled by an all too strict set of conditions that can never accurately be recreated. Each time we return to it, we only see a shred, a ghost, if you will, of what has transpired. It is a translucent image, with the backdrop of experience shining opaquely through it. And just as the very details of that image are slipping, so too is our grasp of the phantasm that tears at old wounds. Regret will be our only keepsake of it.

“Time is the Enemy,” Kerima Polotan says, and we are ill equipped to vanquish it. Perhaps we never will be.