Past the Present
I keep a 65-pages-and-counting Word doc where I jot down notable quotes from books I’m reading. It’s only for library books — otherwise, I’m a write (right?)-in-the-book annotator. (Sorry, not interested in apps that claim to make this process easier, esp if there’s a “social”/sharing component.)
I have until Jan 19 to view the Clare Rojas exhibit “Past the Present” at the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art (pictured at right). I like what I know of Rojas’ art, but I’m also intrigued by this exhibit’s title, which is at once vague but also maybe impossible. Because if you go past the present isn’t that the future?
Either way, I like ruminating on how past and present (and future?) loop together, and how our memories (both collective and individual) shape moments. I see this museum every day and took this pic early in the morning of December 31 as Matt and I were walking the dog. In particular, I was struck by the ever-changing skyline — the present morphing into the future with small, sometimes-undetectable vestiges of the past. (If you’re local, it’s fun to spy the old façade of the former Ratcliffe Flower Shop, where Bernardin’s now is.) So I decided to do a search through my Word doc for any mention of “past.” There are 35.
Click to enlarge
You can click these images to read some screenshots from that doc. (I also threw in a fitting Niall Williams quote even though it doesn’t have “past” in it…just because.)
But here’s my favorite, from The Autobiography of My Mother, by Jamaica Kincaid:
“The present is always perfect. No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I live. The future I never long for, it will come or it will not; one day it will not. But it does not loom up before me, I am never in a state of anticipation. The future is not even like the black space above the sky, with an intermittent spark of light; it is more like a room with no ceiling or floor or walls, it is the present that gives it such a shape, it is the present that encloses it. The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.”
Happy New Year — here’s to the Present.
originally published on instagram