Is yesterday as real as today?
I suppose we all think we have a handle on reality. Of course, that itself may be a problem. Thinking may just possibly not be adequate to reality.
“Whatever is a reality today,” Luigi Pirandello wrote, “whatever you touch and believe in and that seems real for you today, is going to be — like the reality of yesterday — an illusion tomorrow.” This may seem a typical sentiment from the author of Right You Are (If You Think You Are), but there is, nonetheless, more than a little truth to it.
Is yesterday as real as today? I had a wonderful day yesterday, and today seems wan in comparison. Of course, yesterday is past. It is no longer happening. The memory of it may be real — in the sense that I really do remember it right now — but the day is no longer real in the sense of being actual.
And yet … the contrast between a wan today and a robust yesterday cannot be blithely dismissed. The actual — what is going on here and now — is certainly real enough, but it seems there must be more to reality than that.
I am reading a little book called Tales of Lower Olney by John P. Rossi, emeritus professor of history at La Salle University. Jack, who is a few years older than I, used to review for me. We are both products of Philadelphia’s old blue-collar neighborhoods. If you want to know what it was like growing up in one of those neighborhoods in the ’40s and ’50s of the last century, Jack’s book is where you can find out. Reading it has reminded me of how much the 1940s continues to live in me.
There is, for example, a certain cast of light — bright, summer light — that always transports me to a Sunday in the 1940s. When I first came upon Henry Miller’s collection of essays Sunday After the War, the title had the same effect. I do not mean that a certain cast of light or Miller’s title merely remind me of some Sunday back then. What they conjure is a palpable re-experiencing of the person I was then and in some ways remain.
I have lately been amazed to realize that my childhood in the 1940s and my teen years in the 1950s often seem more real and immediate to me than, say the years between 1970 and 1990, when I helped raise a family, and managed some professional accomplishments. I look back on the latter two decades and often find it hard to recognize the person who did those things. Then again, I look in the mirror these days and see someone other than the person inside I have always taken to be the “real” me.
Thomas Aquinas maintained that the knower and the known are one. In his view, the intellect is an active faculty that reaches out from the self to grasp the form of what is encountered outside of the self. That form is then taken into the self and made a part of it, enriching it, making it more than what it had been. If he’s right — and James Joyce thought he was; this is the epistemological underpinning of Ulysses — then reality exists neither in the self nor in the world but in the mysterious zone where the two intersect. It is the complex of interrelations between them.
Complex is the operative word. For the selection and arrangement of details of self and world that go to make up the reality one actually inhabits is a well-nigh incomprehensible blur of intention and attention. Do things draw us to themselves or do we draw them to ourselves? Or is it some strange collusion that takes place? St. Augustine says, “If you do not ask me what time is, I know it; if you ask me, I do not know.” One might say the same of reality: To live it is one thing, to say what exactly it is quite another. That being the case, perhaps I should give the last word on this elusive topic to Woody Allen: “Cloquet hated reality, but realized it was the only place to get a good steak.”
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That was a very thought-provoking piece; I especially liked what you wrote here: “The memory of it may be real — in the sense that I really do remember it right now — but the day is no longer real in the sense of being actual.”
It’s true, that with the passing of the previous day, the highs and lows become somewhat muted to me when I compare them with the reality of today. And I also think it’s true that reality is what we make of it. That what is real to me right now might not be real to me tomorrow, but that doesn’t make it any less real now.