THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST

We have touched already on the presence of the past and reaffirmed its reality against presentism. We have, however, scarcely touched on “the past” in itself. The imperialism of the present is evident even in our endeavour to curtail it. By looking at the past through the lens of the present, we have done insufficient justice to its complexity and non-homogeneity. The present chapter will endeavour to rectify this.

Preliminary, unsystematic observations

That single, poignant line has been transmitted through all the layers of the past that separate us from its author who lived in Paris over half a millennium ago. Villon's voice was silenced when he died at the age of 30. Few of us can recall anything else of the Ballade whose refrain it forms, or of the Grand Testament he left behind which contains the Ballade, or of the man who wrote it. And yet it can still move us: the poetic dart still has the power to pierce. Thinking back along its trajectory to this moment highlights the many layers of one (Eurocentric) version of the past: yesterday's sudden rain shower; last week's ward round; a holiday a few months ago; a walk 30 years past when a now grown up child was two weeks old; the Fifties of the last century, when the Second World War was still a recent, hideous memory; Einstein's annus mirabilis of 1905, marked by those famous papers that transformed our understanding of the physical world; the birth of a certain kind of fiction with the publication of Madame Bovary in 1857; Napoleon's self-coronation as Emperor in 1804; Captain Cook's arrival in Australia in 1756; the ending of the English Civil War in 1645; 1609 and Galileo's discovery of the moons of Jupiter; the moment in 1543 when Copernicus’ heliocentric thesis was offered to the world; and so back to 1463 and the silencing of the voice that uttered those lines.