How long does the present last? In other words, when is something no longer ‘wrong’, but a thing of the past? It’s a question that comes to mind after a few isolated incidents.
Someone asked if I Journey to the end of the night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline. “I’m still working on it,” I said. I had started it, thought it was masterful but rather intense, and I had put it aside for something else. At any moment I could pick up the thread again. Only, I thought now: the ‘putting it down’ happened in June 2009, and I hadn’t touched the book since. Thirteen years later, can you still maintain that you are ‘working on something’? If not, when did that stop?
Another thing: someone asked me if I do sports. “Yes, I play tennis”, I said. After thinking for a while: “Or at least I did until I got RSI five years ago. But now I walk every weekend.” After thinking again: “Well, I actually did that mainly in the first corona year.” Silence. “Actually, I don’t exercise, no.”
I discuss the phenomenon with my sister and her boyfriend. “It often has to do with self-image,” he says. “For example, I have maintained for a long time that I have no friends, but when I look around me lately, that is no longer true.” His friendless self has become a thing of the past unnoticed. My sister adds that for a long time she saw herself as much thinner than she had actually become, and that she dismissed pictures that didn’t fit as ‘a distorted image’.
For a long time you think something is the exception, until you realize it has become the new rule. I think I’m still in touch with friend X, that we regularly have a glass of vermouth together (I only do that with him). In fact, I haven’t seen him in four years. Is he still “someone I drink vermouth with”?
We see something similar in the world around us. I live in a country with real winters and fickle summers; in winter I regularly go ice skating; how annoying it is to cycle behind someone in the snow and not be able to overtake. These things feel like facts and opinions about my current life. But when was the last time I cycled behind someone in the snow? At least ten years ago. Are those winters still going on? How do you determine that?
I think it has to do with continuity. Suppose I saw the friend I drink vermouth with once every five years, then the current situation would not deviate from our routine. But we saw each other a lot more often. There is a break with the routine, which thus changes into the past. The same can be said about the real winters. They are now so much the exception that they are no longer part of the present.
Viewed in this way, a point in time can be present and past at the same time. For example, I’ve been drinking three cups of black filter coffee every morning since 2004. In the field of coffee, there is continuity from that moment on; 2004 feels like ‘the present’ in that sense. But many other things from 2004 are definitely over: exams, cigarettes, glasses of beer worth one euro forty.
It is easy to recognize the past as such when there has been a clear break: a move, a new job, a divorce or a new meeting. But for lack of that, life changes insidiously, and you sometimes have to recognize with a shock that something no longer belongs to the present.
It is the same with the Dutch self-image. 2002 was a clear break: the murder of Fortuyn and the turning point in the public debate. In the absence of similar breaks after that time, I usually see the last twenty years in a political sense as ‘the present’. But secretly, a lot has changed, little by little. And suddenly we live in a country with twenty parliamentary groups, radicalising parties, a gang of threatened politicians, and an acute shortage of people who want to become active in local politics. A country where ‘#kutland’ was trending on Twitter this Thursday. This does not fit with the Dutch self-image of a stable, well-governed democracy in which reason ultimately wins.
Can we still see the current situation as an exception, or is it the new rule – and has that ‘present’ of mine already become a thing of the past?
Floor Rusman ([email protected]) is editor of NRC
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of 16 July 2022