Notes on Time, Part 4

David Runciman, writing in the most recent issue of the London Review of Books ("Too early or too late?" LRB, vol. 72, no. 7 (April 2, 2020), p. 7-9), makes a distinction between two broad approaches to the current crisis. Those on the right, "worried that massive upfront government intervention would have damaging effects down the line," opposed by those on the left who argue for life-saving social and economic interventions today.

[As I write, two blue jays alight on the magnolia tree, look inside for a moment, then swoop away.]

But for me, the passage that stood out:

This argument is, in part, about how we should think of the future. For those [on the right, arguing against massive intervention now] who warn about a second wave of illness... the future is long, almost as long as the past. It is a place where we'll have to live, whether we like it or not. This is one of the things that makes them - or many of them - conservatives. For those who itch for action sooner, the future is both more remote and more pliable. It is a place that can be what we would like it to be, if only we put in the effort. (p. 8)

Forecasts and predictions and models have been on my mind a lot lately (on many people's minds, I think?). Recently, I've also been lecturing [really, speaking into a microphone] about the role of the imagination in shaping and making political geographies. But I think what's coming together in my head is a sense that our imaginations - individual, collective, social - function as a kind of heuristic, shaping our expectations about what the world is; how cause and effect are related; how actions in the present might or might not play out in the future.

Somehow related, my colleague recommended an essay written by Mateusz Laszczkowski. The essay itself is wonderful - smart and observant, all the more valuable because it cites Olga Tokarczuk's remarkable Nobel Prize address. I want to return to that acceptance speech, but it opens with its own observations about the future:

When I later asked her about that sadness—which I did on numerous occasions, always prompting the same response—my mother would say that she was sad because I hadn’t been born yet, yet she already missed me.

“How can you miss me when I’m not there yet?” I would ask.

I knew that you miss someone you’ve lost, that longing is an effect of loss.

“But it can also work the other way around,” she answered. “Missing a person means they’re there.”

This brief exchange, someplace in the countryside in western Poland in the late sixties, an exchange between my mother and me, her small child, has always remained in my memory and given me a store of strength that has lasted me my whole life. For it elevated my existence beyond the ordinary materiality of the world, beyond chance, beyond cause and effect and the laws of probability. She placed my existence out of time, in the sweet vicinity of eternity. In my child’s mind, I understood then that there was more to me than I had ever imagined before. And that even if I were to say, “I’m lost,” then I’d still be starting out with the words “I am”—the most important and the strangest set of words in the world.

Missing the future means it's there, perhaps.