Absolutely Modern, Again

I'm starting to understand why the moderns wanted to be new and do away with the past, that it was utterly essential to be absolutely modern, for relying on the past with longing and nostalgia is a kind of sickness, yet forgetting the past is also a form of sickness - the dangerous amnesia we encounter when we forget the lessons of experience from being alive, and we repeat the same mistakes over and over as if all our actions were controlled through some cosmic instant replay, with a drunk producer half asleep at the controls, pausing and replaying in varying speeds and at random all our mistakes.

This is one of our terrible paradoxes: the longer we live the more intelligence and wisdom we gain and the more we learn how to figure out the struggle of existence; yet, the longer we live the more we also get flooded and pursued by images and memories of our past. They say when you die your life flashes before your eye. Well, it's already flashing before my eyes and I'm still quite alive. All the things I have done, blurry memories of all the scenes of my life, all of them starring me yet also an utter stranger in all these snapshots, images, movie clips, feelings and sensations of another time - a time I cannot now be sure ever really happened.

We cannot escape the past completey, but it's worthwhile to dispose of it, murder it, do away with, destroy all previous characters and personas your have inhabited, dismantle your ego and identity - for when we live there in the past, when we occupy the moments of our waking and dreaming life with all those images of the past, we are as good as dead, walking shadows and memory shades floating and fretting around Hades, wishing for some land where everything seems to have been better, more golden, more special, our lives more interesting and enriched and without pain. All an illusion.