Last Sunday, I walked from our temporary quarters on Bridge Street to the end of Joralemon Street, at the East River, about one mile away. Paved with cobblestones for the last few blocks, the street is lined with mid-19th century townhouses, many with splendid front gardens. As I walked down the street towards the river, I thought back to the time that I lived only a ten minute walk away, on Monroe Place, more than 50 years ago and wondered at my lack of curiosity at the time. It never occurred to me to explore the historic and remarkably beautiful area in which I was then living.
Am I the same person now that I was then? What connects me to that foolish, self-absorbed young man whose riotous living should have gotten him into far more trouble than it did? If “cigarettes and whiskey and wild, wild women will drive a man crazy,” as the old song goes, I should have landed in a locked ward at Bellevue instead of managing to return each night to Monroe Place.
My cells have been replaced several times over since then. I’m no more like that young man today than I am like Herbert Hoover. What binds me to that youth are my memories, but memories change with age, just as dispositions do. When I compare my childhood memories to those held by my brother and sister about the same events, the discrepancies are often huge, as if we had each grown up in different households. Memory is treacherous.
Perhaps the self is like a bubble floating on the ocean, its contents continually changing as the water moves under it. If so, the continuity of the self is an illusion. I hope that’s true, for I don’t much care for the young man that once I was.
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I give you a quotation:
ReplyDeleteyesterday is history
the future is mystery
today is the present
Wally
In my opinion, we ARE the same people we were in our youth,even though every cell has changed many times over. I recognize in myself the same emotional patterns and the same proclivities as I had when young. It is true that my ability to ACT on these proclivities has changed -- I often cannot DO what I used to be able to do.
ReplyDeleteThen again, hopefully, I have learned something since my youth, so that -- again hopefully -- my actions may be a bit less socially unacceptable than they were then. Maybe not!
Looking at the writing I did in my twenties, I recognize the same "self" that I see in my writing fifty years later -- although my current writing, in some ways, is more accomplished.
I know that both you, Anchises, and I are in love with our respective wives with fervor equaling or maybe surpassing what it was when we married them, decades and decades ago. Is it the same US loving the same THEM? I think it is.
Shakespeare wrote, "Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds", and I think that is true. Real love doesn't alter even though the beloved alters, or even though we ourselves alter by having each of our cells replaced many times over.
I cannot prove that this is so. But those lucky enough to be happily married for decades know that it is.
I suggest, Anchises, that your youthful "self" that you now reject is still in you, though the wisdom of your later years has redirected its energies in more acceptable directions. That you have been able to mature so beautifully suggests that the capacity for growth existed in you even when you may have been indulging in "cigarettes and whiskey and wild, wild women."
How can this be? That's the mystery that makes life interesting.