Today’s prompts were “greatest first lines of novels.”
We started with The Go Between by L. P. Hartley published in 1953.
The first sentence is:
The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.
My friend Sean said he would like to be able to hear me read this to think about it. So if you would rather listen than read, please click on the audio file here. Or scroll down to find the text.
As soon as we mention the past, we invoke the existence of time. Of course physicists and cosmologists know that time is not linear, and the past does not disappear. When we look at a starry sky, we are seeing light that left the surface of its star at different times, depending on which star we are looking at. Unless we’re using a telescope, probably many different stars, so we are simultaneously receiving light that is young and old. But from our conventional experience of time, it does seem as if the future becomes the present, and then the past. In other words, metaphorically, time flows.
Heraclitus warned us that, despite a river having a permanent name, you can’t step into it twice. Furthermore, he noted that the person doing the stepping changes along with the river. For now, I will focus on the river. The point being that the name, perhaps, carries not so important a set of data with it as the temperature of the water, the pH of the water, the minerals carried along, dissolved and traveling far, or locked into pebbles or sand, and merely vibrating, rolling a short way, or participating in a mixture of those activities. The fish, the algae, the protozoans, the insect larvae, all contribute to the entity we call a river. The shoreline spreads to a varying degree, sometimes shrinking to almost a true line, other times widening to a broad swath. Is the young kid casting a lure into the trout pool a part of the river now? What about three hours ago, when she was eating breakfast at her mother’s kitchen table?
The land and the river merge into a unity. Without land in sight, there is no river. Perhaps a lake, and certainly an ocean, reaches far enough to conceal its boundaries from the one who floats on it or within its volume. But a river? A river carves the land, and the land contains the river. The land the river crosses defines the river itself. So how to separate the river from the country it flows through? The otter doesn’t care. Nor does the dragonfly. Alive for a few seasons, these entities might not notice changes. Either the environment supports its life, or does not.
Yet, longer lived entities, holding greater networks of memory, may note that these water molecules, with this concentration of dissociated hydrogen ions, and that concentration of dissolved calcium atoms, the exact position of the edge of the water, the depth profile of the silt along the 43rd parallel, vary from the characteristics recorded during youth. The air above the water-land-country mixes with the under-layers, providing the oxygen that the inhabitants, both visible and microscopic, require.
As the composition of the atmosphere changes, the transfer of energy to the water-land-country varies. A thick layer of ice covered what we today call Alaska and Chukchi. Now people refer to this same range of latitudes and longitudes, modified as required by the ongoing drift of the tectonic plates, as Beringia. The people who scientists believe, and aboriginal Americans say, skirted its edges in boats to people the western coasts of the Americas, or walked along the edges of its widening corridor to the interiors of these continents, likely used a different name. Whatever its handle, Beringia is a different country, and the history waves plying the ether carry onward the observations, thoughts, stories and acts of a different time, no less vital than the one we currently call now.
