Time is a great deadener. People forget, get bored, grow old, go away.

-Jeanette Winterson

The chapter Deuteronomy in Oranges is perhaps the most comprehensive chapter in any growing up book. Who would've thought that the Nature Of Time would be a concern in the developing stages of teenage puberty? But Time is important. How we make sense of the past dictates our identity - how we force fit it until it looks the way we think it is. In one over-arching chapter she touches on Identity, Voice, and Sexuality.

But this is not a Winterson review. Allow me to expound on my half-assed thoughts on the past. Its nothing new, I know. But they are significant to me this period.

The fact is that the past is a nebulous thing. Airy, gassy, ethereal. The events of the past do not have any real shape, they do not take form and press down on our memory. No, all we are bound to in our reimagining of the past is the physical objects that we are surrounded by.

And even then what are those? Inanimate objects - no mind, no voice. One may say, for example, that an empty glass of water is proof of the previous event of me drinking it, but who is to say the glass was not empty in the first place? Who is to say it was not someone else who drank it?

The person who saw me drink it. We then establish a very important point - the past is dictated by humans, making sense of the objects around us.

Those with minds bend the past to their will all the time. We choose to forget, we choose to remember, we choose to add siginificance, exaggerate, play down. Our power to do this is limited, of course, by the number of people who would oppose our will. If twenty people saw me drink the glass of water, for example, it would be hard for me to say otherwise.

And so in public events, the past is dictated by the collective will of the majority. But what of the private events then - what of those events that occur between two people, what of those events that occur within ourselves?

A question that has always haunted me (and I'm quite sure many others), was that if we were able to tamper with everyone's memory, would we then have the power to change the past? A useless philosophical question, no doubt, since it would be impossible to tamper with everyone's memory. But in the private context it takes on a damning importance.

I know this is old, but the fact is that everyone sees an event differently. When I say the collective will of the majority, then, I mean an averaging out of all the different perspectives. Some may have thought I drank the glass of water quickly, some may have thought I took forever - but all would agree that I drank it. The averaging out of perspectives is what goes on in history books, in diaries and records. "Seraphically free from taint of personality", to quote EM Forster's The Machine Stops.

An event that everyone sees holds no special meaning for me, just as a lecture that everyone agrees on holds no meaning for Kuno. I am not interested in this.

But when events occur between two people - that is where it gets complicated.

I believe that the reason why people often tell others their deepest darkest misdeeds, is simply to establish a stronger hold on the reality s/he perceives has happened. Because the deepest darkest misdeeds hold the most significance for us - the past of the event is elaborately crafted purely by our mind, and our mind alone. In our exposition of this event, then, to a trusted friend or confidante, what we really do is enforce the reality of the situation - we try to make our version the averaged perspective.

But why this insecurity?

Because events that happen between two people are terrifying. They are terrifying because they could very well not be happening - an event that you choose to deny, and I choose to deny, could very well not find its way into the world's averaged perspective. If I drank the glass of water with a good friend, I could persuade him to agree not to tell anyone that I did. Assuming I succeed, the glass of water could very well have been empty for all eternity.

People do not like this, of course. My friend is not likely to cooperate. because to bend the past to your will is an exhibition of power - no one likes to know that you're getting your way all the time.

Every event that happens between two people spawns two realities, assuming that these two people have minds. From these two realities, one reality will make it into the averaged perspective, the collective consciousness of the world. This one reality will be the product of the power clash between two realities, the product of the two people making sense of the event. The one with the stronger mind will have more influence to bend this event to their will, of course, the weaker, less.

The reality that enters the collective consciousness is a bit like a baby - it is these two people's contribution to the world. It is showered with love in the same way parents dote on their child as well - in order to gain attention from it.

So the fundamental insecurity over our grip on the past is understandable. Love is a zero-sum gain. If I love you, more than someone else, it is as good as saying I do not love this someone else. Milan Kundera illustrates it in Immortality, I'm too lazy to drag out the anecdote. Suffice to say though that the addition of "more than someone else" is superfluous - superfluous to the point that it betrays the speaker's euphemisms.

And so people will fight over the past, they will gossip, squeeze it into history books, write diaries, letters, videotape and snapshot. Ultimately we want to derive love from the world through our contribution to it. Private events are our babies - that is its significance. From birth, parents fight over what they want their babies to become when they grow up and go out into the world, they say he has the father eyes, the mother's chin, etc. etc. In the same way our perspectives on an event are coloured by our wills - our will to bend the world into the shape we desire, be it utopia or dystopia.