Sunday, August 15, 2010
Déjà vu
From Fire on the Plains by Shohei Ooka, a fictionalized account of the Philippine theater of WWII from the perspective of a soldier slipping into total depravity (the troops got scattered, he is alone and there is no food on the island):
"As I walked along the plain, I felt certain that by probing within myself I could arrive at some more satisfactory explanation of "false recollection" than the mechanical theory that it resulted from a precedence of memory over consciousness at moments of mental exhaustion.
I now recalled the strange feelings that I had experienced some weeks before while walking through the forest after leaving my company. I had then been struck by the knowledge that I would never again pass the place where I was then walking. According to my conclusions at the time, the reason I was so moved by this knowledge was that I was anticipating my own death, and knew that I was no longer able to realize the fundamental premise of my normal life-feeling, namely the inherent assumption that I could repeat indefinitely what I was doing at the moment.
Granting that these conclusions were more or less correct, might it not be possible to explain my present feeling (that I had already done in the past what I was now doing) as a simple perversion of a wish that I might do it in the future? Might not one's mind, when it perceives that there is no possibility of repeating present experiences in the future, project these experiences into the past? In that case, the fact that "false recollections" appear at moments of fatigue or prostration need no longer be explained by any hypothesis that life has momentarily ceased its constant evolution; instead, it would indicate that at such moments, when the flow of one's everyday life is interrupted, the idea of being able to repeat what one is now doing (an idea that normally is taken for granted) emerges to the fore, and one's present actions are automatically projected into the past in order to make such repetition possible.
Now as I walked on, I was no longer worried by the rapidly ascending dawn. Everyone in the world, my past self included, lived under a constant illusion of repetition. Only I, as I headed toward death, no longer believed that I would repeat the present. This conviction lent me a new sense of daring."
(from the chapter "The Downhill Path")
"As I walked along the plain, I felt certain that by probing within myself I could arrive at some more satisfactory explanation of "false recollection" than the mechanical theory that it resulted from a precedence of memory over consciousness at moments of mental exhaustion.
I now recalled the strange feelings that I had experienced some weeks before while walking through the forest after leaving my company. I had then been struck by the knowledge that I would never again pass the place where I was then walking. According to my conclusions at the time, the reason I was so moved by this knowledge was that I was anticipating my own death, and knew that I was no longer able to realize the fundamental premise of my normal life-feeling, namely the inherent assumption that I could repeat indefinitely what I was doing at the moment.
Granting that these conclusions were more or less correct, might it not be possible to explain my present feeling (that I had already done in the past what I was now doing) as a simple perversion of a wish that I might do it in the future? Might not one's mind, when it perceives that there is no possibility of repeating present experiences in the future, project these experiences into the past? In that case, the fact that "false recollections" appear at moments of fatigue or prostration need no longer be explained by any hypothesis that life has momentarily ceased its constant evolution; instead, it would indicate that at such moments, when the flow of one's everyday life is interrupted, the idea of being able to repeat what one is now doing (an idea that normally is taken for granted) emerges to the fore, and one's present actions are automatically projected into the past in order to make such repetition possible.
Now as I walked on, I was no longer worried by the rapidly ascending dawn. Everyone in the world, my past self included, lived under a constant illusion of repetition. Only I, as I headed toward death, no longer believed that I would repeat the present. This conviction lent me a new sense of daring."
(from the chapter "The Downhill Path")
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¶ 9:51 PM
