“The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
William Faulkner
That is a deep psychological truth. The deep psyche has no sense of time. Memories, for example, can affect us as if they were happening today. ("effect" and "affect" always challenge my grammatical memory.)
My topic however, is the internet. This thing has become a gigantic repository of everything, and it is all basically accessible to anybody. Even the FBI can't really "lose" old emails. There is no need to get paranoid about it because nobody gives a damn about most of us, but it is a strange development that much of our lives have become searchable.
It's like living in a small town, where everybody knows everything that goes on and especially the secrets. How easy was it to find out about Trump's goumada?
A friend and I were discussing this over drinks the other night, and we agreed that we were glad that the shameful things and misdemeanors we had done in reckless youth were pre-internet. We both grew into straight-arrow adults after our careless phases, so that worked.
If anybody can find it, there was a Calvin and Hobbes toon in which Calvin as a 6 year-old (?) was documenting a false childhood for himself in case he ever decided to run for president or something. Genius. Hobbes took a photo of Calvin pretending to read a book.
A fake past is a cool idea, but how does anybody turn over a new leaf when the past is always dragged behind them? It makes it difficult to do or say stupid things, which means it makes it difficult to be normal.
