Being here again, I can recall...

I'm wondering very much about our relationship to the past. Faulkner wrote that "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." In his summation of Jay Gatsby's story, Nick Carraway observes, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Fitzgerald and Faulkner were both Modernists and we all know the short version of Modernism: alienation from a fragmented world; retreat to the past and/or tradition; formal experimentation; etc.

However, I think the past plays an important role beyond Modernist yearning for a mythical wholeness or a more "pure" culture. Afterall, Shakespeare wrote "What is past is prologue." The Bard's simple phrase establishes the continuity of events, whether world-historical or personal (the Montague-Capulet feud was, of course, none of Romeo or Juliet's doing, yet they were certainly caught up in it).

We're always fighting over the past. The Right wants to lay claim to a certain interpretation of American history, as does the Left (although the Left generally talks in terms of "histories"). Immigration, a fact of this country since before its inception as the United States of America, is constantly under attack from Nativists and xenophobes and downright racists who hearken back to a unified past culture that never actually existed.

Marx argued that "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."

So I've been stuck thinking about the past lately.