Running in Circles

Part of the peculiar predicament of being human is our need to remember, not simply in the sense of retaining useful lessons acquired in our encounters with our environment, but in the more mysterious sense of situating ourselves within stories that might explain us to ourselves and help rescue us from our bewilderment at finding ourselves thrown into this world from we know not where. That is not a merely private labor; it cannot be. It is by definition a communal act, not only shared in common but regularly reenacted, ritually or liturgically, practically or poetically, in countlessly diverse modes of celebration, lamentation, speculation, and observance. This is memory understood in the full sense of anamnesis, the positive overcoming of forgetfulness not only of the past of an individual psychology, but of the past of all things, in all its archetypal dimensions – memory, that is, continuously recovered through fidelity to immemorial customs. It is also of necessity a constant merging of horizons, a constant superimposition of mnemonic layers one upon another, which are often stubbornly opaque but which we are always nevertheless attempting to make diaphanous before something deeper than we can immediately recall. We have a spiritual need to make sense of our own lives by glimpsing a larger history through our personal recollections, but that history too is comprehensible to us only to the degree that it allows us to see through it and to catch further glimpses of a remote mythic time lying before and beyond the flow of ordinary time. And even this is not enough. Mythic time is intelligible – or, at any rate, illuminating – only insofar as it permits us to remember eternity.