Essay（s） by Israel Zangwill
"Looking Backward"
Israel Zangwill
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Looking backward is a luxury which should be indulged in only moderation--say once in fifty years. The preachers will tell you differently. But life is so restless and feverish nowadays that there is no time for obeying the preachers. It is as much as we can do to find time to listen to them. Goethe says, "He who looks forward sees only one way to pursue, but he who looks backward sees many." This is the last word on the subject. It speaks volumes. But as you cannot walk through any of those backways, what is the use of bothering to look for them? True, your own experience enables you to give advice to others. But advice is a drug in the market. What am I saying? A drug! No, no! Even a drug is taken sometimes. Advice never is. We learn only from our own mistakes, and when it is too late to profit by them. No; there is not much profit in looking backwards. Often it tends to make you pessimistic, to sap your energy, to petrify you, as it did Lot's wife. At other times, contrariwise, it makes you expel such salt as is already in you, dissolved in tears--
So sweet, so sad, the days that are no more.
Yet what is this but another form of Buskin's "Pathetic fallacy"? Those divinely sweet, sad days were in reality just as commonplace as to-day.
Life is a chaos of comic confusion,
Past things alone take a halo harmonious;
So from illusion we wake to illusion,
Each as the rest just as true and erroneous.
A familiar form of the new illusion we wake to is seen in the exclamation that so often follows retrospection: "Oh, what a fool I was!" As a rule, nothing can be more conceited than this use of the past tense. A few people, perhaps, can look back complacently upon "a well-spent life" (wherein all the years have been laid out to advantage, and every hour has been made to go as far as seventy-five minutes, and every odd second has been worth a row of pins at least); but I should not care to meet them. For the bulk of us it is best to press on, doing what our hand findeth to do, and letting the dead past bury its dead. It is quite enough to know we cannot escape paying the funeral bills. One of my friends found himself let in for the discharge of a number of extra bills, owing to his retrospective proclivities. He was just beginning to overcome the adverse financial fates when, taking a complacent survey of his past, he was horrified to find it bristling with forgotten debts. Looking backward nearly ruined that man. Another of my friends lost his life entirely through it. He was an old man and a celebrity, and a publisher offered him L2000 for his memoirs. Unfortunately my friend had a very bad memory and no diaries, and, like my other friend, he was conscientious. The publisher's offer tantalized him terribly. He did not know what to do. At last, in despair, he determined to drown himself. On the moment before his death all his past life would come back to him and pass before his mental vision. Of course I was to rescue him the instant he lost consciousness, have him rubbed with hot towels and the rest of it. We went out bathing together, and everything came off as arranged, all except his resurrection. He was too old for such experiments.
A cynical Frenchman has defined life as the collection of recollections for the time when you shall have no memory. It is, at any rate, true (and the preachers are welcome to the moral) that the keenest joys of the senses leave a scant deposit in the memory, and that if sensual pleasures are doubled in anticipation, it is the spiritual that are doubled in looking backward.
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Israel Zangwill's essay: "Looking Backward"