Whither Used To?

Ah, the fertile fluff of sentiment! How it wows us on! Was it perhaps Norman Vincent Perp or was it Vincent Van Gorp who once stuttered, "The past, she or he ain't what we used to think it ought to be!"? At odds, as always, with current thinking in nostalgia, brave souls suffering from a lack of maudlin tendencies challenge their mawkish peers with cold, rational eyeglasses shined on the blurry charts of history. Yet are they doomed to fail? Or shall they instill rigorous & removed standards on the industries that make the most of human rue, regret & recrimination? Irony of ironies! Only time will tell.

Confined as they are to dismissing the human desire to ponder & misconstrue, these scholars perhaps downplay the point of remembrance: a double chance at redemption: first, in the possible misremembering - especially if no one from "those days" is around to gainsay one; & second, in vows & promises, to oneself & others, to have "learned" from the events now embarrassingly etched into one's psyche. Opinion polls strongly suggest the former to be the most successful, as it requires the least amount of work.

Who, then, shall step up to employ & therefore subvert these techniques? Perhaps the mission might begin with the abandonment of the competition paradigm - surely how one views what once was in attempts to recast it as what could never have been is not an either/or proposition. Dr. Lenny Caldicott of the imaginary Flutter Institute has begun such a project, identifying nearly fourteen ways a human can wrangle with wistfulness. But even he admits his meager & tentative forays into this new scholarly wilderness are barely the beginning - "I'm not terribly inventive," he confides. "Also, I'm a little dumb." He urges graduate students & coffee shop baristas to enter the field en masse, to transform it utterly in the same way a previous generations invented such things as "the humanities" & "American studies." "It can't go on the way it used to," he says, "& even that sentence deserves at the very least a write-up in the 'news' box of your average academic journal."

Whatever the future, it shall one day be the past, & how it shall be perceived is being grumbled over by a small but sturdy group of new thinkers. One day, then, we can look back & interpret how they chose to look back & interpret, & even then perhaps we can argue about their perceptions, & therefore shall none in this promising field ever be without work, then or now or in the futures that shall be.