Time and Self
85
circumstances, we react in much the same ways. Human nature remains
unchanging.
When Dana’s husband Kevin returns to 19‘^-century Maryland with Dana,
he poses a probing question: “People don’t learn everything about the times that
came before them . . . Why should they?”^^ Neuroscientist, Endel Tulving,
would answer: because we can learn lessons from the past. Memories provide
the groundwork for possibilities in the future. A person gains opportunities to
learn from past experiences in order to predict what may happen down the line.^^
If memory primarily serves as a lesson book for the future, then
forgetfulness can have catastrophic consequences. Humans have poor memories.
Names and dates often escape us, not to mention what we ate for dinner last
Thursday. What we do remember is the overall idea rather than the intricate
details of our experiences.^"^ The holocaust of World War II serves as a powerful
reminder of the catastrophic consequences historical memory loss can have.
Unrealized by many, the slaughter of millions of Jews in Europe has happened
numerous times. Mass fear causes people to look for scapegoats. During the
Black Plague, Jews, already hated for their literary role in betraying Christ,
became easy targets of irrational fear. Between 1348 and 1350, the Black Plague
ended with “nearly every Jew between Bordeaux and Albi dead.”^^ This mass
extermination only echoed the Crusader pogroms of 1096 that annihilated so
many Jews, it came to be known as an “apocalypse.”^^ Nearly 1,000 years later,
history cycled again. Between 1939 and VE Day—May 8, 1945—approximately
six million Jews were driven like cattle from their homes and exterminated.
Elie Wiesel, a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, is perhaps one
of the most zealous advocates for sustaining cultural memory. In his 1986 Nobel
Peace Prize speech, Wiesel powerfully asserted the responsibility of each person
to understand himself amongst past events and their future consequences:
“Tell me,” he asks, “what have you done with my future, what
have you done with your life?” And I tell him that I have tried.
That I have tried to keep memory alive, that I have tried to
fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are
guilty, we are accomplices.^^
Failing to remember results in the repetition of past mistakes. In order to learn
from the past, one must emotionally engage in the stories of the ancestors and
make allowances for history’s great complexities. Indeed, human navigation
through a history of tough choices has led to this point in time.
When Dana, upon a brief return to 1976, needs to relate to someone about
the atrocities she has endured, she closes her textbooks and turns to books about
World War II. She feels a common bond to Jews in concentration camps whose
experiences of beatings, starvation, and “every possible degradation” resemble
the abasement of American slaves during the 19th century.L ater, when Dana
turns on the television she sees news footage of blacks rioting in South Africa.
Dana can personally relate to the many blacks kept impoverished for the