By Wayne Allensworth
A scene near the end of David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai resonates with the older me. Colonel Nicholson, played by the great Alec Guiness, is walking the length of the bridge built by British soldiers in a Japanese POW camp under the colonel’s supervision. He pauses and looks out over the waters of the river and notes that he has had a good life and career, but that he knows they are now closer to the end than to the beginning. And you begin to take stock of your life and wonder what it has amounted to.
I look through boxes of old pictures and wonder, like Colonel Nicholson. The people of the past, my ancestors, would have been considered old at my age. Their faces were weathered. Their bodies worn. It was a harder life. And now? It appears that the cycle of visits to doctors to treat various ailments and keep me up and running has begun. I’m fortunate. It’s nothing life threatening, but it is unpleasant, and even, how to say it? Unexpected. Something that happened to other people. And the doctors all want blood. Bloodwork, the kind of “work” I had never given much thought to as a young man chasing whatever goals I had. Everything seemed ahead of me, life so full of possibilities. There were no doubts then. I had complete confidence in my ability to achieve my aims. The years ahead seemed like a dream; 10 years an eternity; 20 far out in the distant mists. Beyond that, the realm of mystery.
But the stages of life, something of a cliché, are real enough, and the aspects of one’s personality, always complex and layered, come out in different phases of life’s hills and valleys. And you look back sometimes and wonder, “Was that me? How could I have been so stupid? So lucky.” Or, sometimes, so much better or worse than you thought you could be. And you start realizing that whatever you became it was because of a deep and mysterious interplay of yourself, in all that self’s complexity, with other selves. That your personality is not entirely your own, isolated and solipsistic. That you learned some things from those other selves sometimes without even realizing it, without their ever knowing. And maybe, just maybe, you passed on something to them. You never can tell. Life is a flow of exchange and transformation.
You make mistakes and try to correct them. But sometimes it’s too late, so you must live with it and try and never repeat it. In another scene in The Bridge on the River Kwai, Nicholson realizes that he inadvertently helped the Japanese by building their bridge. “What have I done?” he asks of himself. It’s a question that all of us have to ask ourselves sometimes.
I taught school for a few years in the early 1980s before moving on to my next life, and I always wondered if anything I ever did then made a difference. I was lucky to bump into some former students along the way and was pleased — surprised — that some of them really had picked up something from me, even if it was simply some encouragement. But they changed me, too. Call it a form of entanglement, as in physics. Once two entities encounter each other, in some way they are forever connected, and the changes from those encounters resonate through the field that is the conscious life we all live. I try to remember that and take it into account. It’s an awesome relationship. And responsibility.
So it is with family, which goes without saying, and with friends. What has stuck with me throughout my life, wherever I go and whatever I’m doing, are the deep connections, the intensity of relationships I had with old friends from my formative years. The people who made me. And I, to some extent, them. They say that you are born with a certain number of brain neurons, those primary cells of the nervous system, highways for perception that are at the core of us as human personalities. Every so often, most of the other cells in your body are repaired and replaced. But for the most part, the neurons in your brain as are as old as you are. Think of it like renovating a house. At some point, an old structure has had its siding and its roof, and even its frame gradually renewed and replaced, so that one could ask the question, “Is that the same house?” But the people who lived there and who made it have lent it a certain identity, a certain personality. The house, like you, has a history. Most of the neurons in one’s brain are never replaced. They are like the housebuilders whose work maintains a distinct identity to a structure — or being — that is in constant flux. Maybe that’s why the older me inside doesn’t feel any different than the younger me did, apart from being able to look back and assess the past.
On my frequent walks, I think of all of them — of all of you — the faces and the names. The places and the times. The great joys and the fun and sometimes, a sense of regret. It’s a flow of memory, a stream that seems unbroken. I’ve lost some of you. To death. To time and distance. But I remember, and the memories and experiences are what make us who we are. When we meet, sometimes it is hard to express that depth of connection, but it is there and always will be.
A friend asked me not too long ago whether I would, if I could, go back and do it all again. I had to think about that, because being and becoming what we are is so often a struggle. Like Sisyphus, we push the rock up the hill, and it rolls back on us, but maybe not as far down the slope as it was before. Something ventured, something gained. Incrementally, we’ve learned something. And we resume pushing the rock uphill. I told that friend that maybe I would — if I could go back knowing what I know now. But it struck me that the whole point of the journey was not knowing and learning. That’s the sweet sadness of memory. Without memory, none of us would be ourselves. Our identities are rooted there. I remember all of you.
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes once had, and of their shadows deep
— Wiliam Butler Yeats
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
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