From Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, in which fifty-two year old Clarissa contemplates a moment from when she was eighteen:
“It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers; and even the sex, once she and Richard reached that point, was ardent but awkward, unsatisfying, more kindly than passionate. What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.” (page 98)
This passage, which comes from a beautiful book, makes me wonder: is it possible to live completely in the moment, untethered to either the future or the past?
This singular perfection that Clarissa speaks of as being contained in that moment- did she only felt that particular way because at that moment the future held so much promise? Is she only relishing it now because she wants to construct a meaningful past?
Clearly there are animal pleasures that require little in the way of contemplating time- food, relief from pain, sexual climax. But on a more cerebral plane: when we experience those days in which everything comes together, I wonder if part of their pleasure doesn’t reside in the fact that we are subconciously thinking how much better this is than the past, and how perhaps we have unlocked the secret to being happy in the future. Our most cherished moments are then not cherished most when they are actually occuring, but when they are anticipated and then reflected upon afterwards. The deep pleasure isn’t in living the narrative, but in crafting it and reliving it. We are nothing but who we were and who we will be.