The Past Did Exist
We’re no different than our ancestors.
My father knew his father, and his father knew his, so that by a chain, rusted but unbroken, I am connected to that distant past, which, so often seeming like a thing imagined, requires me to remind myself: “The past did exist.” Each generation looked into the eyes of the one that followed, and the one that preceded, and though after repeated successions each becomes only distant, unmet relatives, they all existed with the exact intricacy and vibrancy of life that belongs to us today. They too felt at the center of their world and saw the far-off future and forgotten past as something less real than their present. Someday soon we shall be reduced to the pages in a history book, which is but a cupful of the ocean that is our existence. Less will be known about us than is imagined, and we too will be but a dream, with some remote son of our fathers having to remind himself: “The past did exist.”
Martin Vidal is the author of The Ambition Handbook: A Guide for Ambitious Persons
