The Absent Past

Randall Nathan went to the reunion of his high school class last week. They meet every 5 years. This was their 11th time together since they graduated.

He drove down the old dirt road to see the farm where he grew up. At least, he tried to. The road is gone. So are the house and the barn and the garden and the chicken shed and the orchard and the pond, and the woods where he picked blackberries. The pond where the cow drank, where the horse stood in the middle when he didn't want to bear the harness, and the heat and the work that went with it, where the dragonflies flitted in beauty so bright they seemed unreal, where the hen who hatched the ducklings ran along the edge in panic whenever her "children" got into the water.

It's all just part of a hideously ugly strip mine now.

In fact, all of Randall's past is gone. The hospital where he was born, his grade school and high school buildings, his college dormitory and dining hall, now the farm where he grew up, even the factory where he worked when he dropped out of high school, the factory that convinced him that he needed an education.

He knows that the absence of those buildings does not erase his memories. He knows that Tillich in theology and Einstein in physics both turned our thinking around completely and forever when they emphasized time over space. But we ARE spatial people. We cannot exist without it. Can we exist without the spaces in which we used to live but which are no longer there?

He sits and drinks a cup of coffee and remembers the way his father looked, sitting on the back step of their old farm house, drinking a cup of coffee after the morning chores. He wonders if our modern fascination with exploring outer space is just a way of avoiding the necessary exploration of inner space, that space where past and future merge into the eternal now.