Is there no was?

Time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was — only is. — William Faulkner, as quoted by Jean Stein in a 1956 article in The Paris Review

If one has been granted enough years to discover that the years themselves are curious deceivers, there comes a season when the old arithmetic ceases to satisfy, when one no longer believes that life has been composed of separate compartments dutifully emptied as one passes from childhood into youth, from youth into maturity, from maturity into that gentler country where the body begins, with increasing frankness, to confess its own mortality, because one has begun to perceive instead that nothing has been emptied at all, that every self one has ever inhabited remains stubbornly, tenderly, in residence within the one who now looks back and, looking back, discovers that he is also looking inward, and perhaps even forward, since memory has never learned to distinguish directions.

We seniors speak so confidently of what was, as though the word itself possessed the power to dismiss whole continents of feeling into some finished geography beyond our reach, saying that was years ago, that was another life, I was a different person then, never noticing that the voice uttering those sentences has been shaped, syllable by syllable, by the very experiences it presumes to exile, as though a tree should deny the existence of its own rings because they lie beneath the bark. Yet all it takes is the smell of leaves after rain, the cadence of a hymn or a Zemirot or a Nasheed almost forgotten, the touch of a weathered hand unexpectedly resembling one’s father’s or one’s grandmother’s, and suddenly the careful architecture of chronology gives way, not collapsing but revealing itself to have been only scaffolding erected around a house that has always stood entire, every room still inhabited, every screen door still capable of opening — however rusty the hinges.

This is perhaps what age offers those willing to receive its instruction. Youth imagines that living consists in accumulating days. In later life, one begins, slowly and not without resistance, to understand that living has always consisted in gathering presences.

The child who believed the world infinite has not vanished. He waits still beneath the practiced composure of the old face. The young woman whose heart once broke with an anguish she imagined no future could contain has not disappeared into photographs sepiad by time. She speaks still whenever love asks again for courage. The ambitious man, the frightened mother, the lonely widow, the hopeful bridegroom, the dutiful son, the rebellious daughter, the friend who failed another friend and the friend who forgave — all remain, not as faded portraits arranged along a corridor of recollection, but as living chambers of the same mysterious dwelling in which consciousness itself resides, each lending its voice to every decision still to be made.

Maybe this is why the elderly so often pause before answering what the young suppose to be simple questions. Not because memory has abandoned them, as impatience sometimes fears, but because memory has become too abundant to proceed in straight lines. Like light, the young seek the shortest distance between question and answer. Like water, the old have learned that there are no straight rivulets through the country of a human life; every path circles a field once crossed in joy or grief, every conclusion passes again beneath trees planted by forgotten hands, every certainty must greet companions acquired decades before it knew their names. What appears to the impatient as wandering is often fidelity, the soul refusing to separate one truth from all the others that gave it birth.

The elderly are vulnerable to a different mistake. There is a simplistic temptation in old age to measure life as though one were balancing ledgers, adding satisfactions here, subtracting regrets there, wondering whether the sum has justified the labour. Yet the ledger itself is an illusion, because nothing that truly mattered has ever submitted to accounting.

Love does not remain in the years during which it flourished; it continues altering the one who loved. Sorrow does not stay obediently within the season assigned to it; it ripens into compassion, or wisdom, or silence, or sometimes into a wound that still aches whenever another suffers. Even our failures, those we would gladly banish into the comfortable grammar of was, persist in quieter forms, not merely as sources of shame but as unexpected tutors in gentleness, teaching us to recognize in another’s weakness an older acquaintance rather than a stranger.

So one begins, almost despite oneself, to suspect that the great mercy concealed within advancing age is not that it carries us farther from our beginnings, but that it finally grants us eyes patient enough to perceive we have never left them. The mother long buried still teaches the gesture with which one comforts a grandchild. The father whose voice has been silent for decades still corrects the posture of one’s conscience. The friends already surrendered to earth continue speaking through remembered laughter until one can no longer say whether memory is preserving them or whether they, in some fashion beyond explanation, are preserving us.

To me, this is what Faulkner was underscoring with such relentless clarity when he refused to grant sovereignty to the word was. Not that clocks deceive us, nor that history can be undone, but that existence itself is deeper than chronology, that a human soul is not a procession of abandoned selves marching away into darkness, but a single, immeasurable present in which every love remains capable of gratitude, every grief remains capable of tenderness, every joy continues quietly illuminating the rooms it once entered, and every act of mercy offered today reaches, by ways invisible but no less real, toward every yesterday that formed the hand now extending itself to another.

In that famous interview with Stein, who was 19 when they met to his infatuated 56 and soon to become the rare lover to whom he actually proposed marriage (she wisely declined), Faulkner was revisiting a theme from his 1951 novel, Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

And if this is so, then growing older need not be understood chiefly as the gradual surrender of strength, or speed, or certainty, but as the rare privilege of seeing more of one’s own life at once. The horizon widens. The scattered fragments begin, however imperfectly, to reveal their hidden design.

One discovers that the child, the parent, the labourer, the lover, the mourner, the dreamer and the elder have never been strangers politely introducing themselves one after another, but companions who have walked together from the beginning, each carrying what the others lacked, each waiting for enough years to pass before it could finally be seen that there had never been a was at all, but only the vast and mysterious is, within which every faithful thing, every broken thing, every forgiven thing, still lives.

At the very least, this is a positive, optimistic way to look at aging — to which it is not always easy to subscribe. Here’s something else Faulkner said to Stein — who went on to become one of the “radical chic” figures of the New Journalism of half a century ago — quoted in the Paris Review interview that launched her career as the chronicler nonpareil of the lives of rich, privileged and famous Americans, from Robert Kennedy to Andy Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick:

“If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.”

Who can say whether she still believed this in 2017, when at 83 she ended her life by leaping from the same Manhattan penthouse apartment from which Gloria Vanderbilt’s son Carter (older brother to CNN’s Anderson Cooper) had theatrically plunged to his death 29 years before?