“Life passes. The clouds change perpetually over our houses.”
The Waves, Virginia Woolf

I let the days become months and now we’re in restart territory. Looking back over the archives and wondering what fragments, what images from our past writings still resonate?

I’m gonna take that excuse to go back a few years further.

Sometime in my mid-twenties, when I was on the cusp of leaving the remaining bits of home I still clung to, the city of my youth, the university in which I became myself, I started reciting the passage that quote above comes from, over and over. In full, it goes like this:

Percival has died (he died in Egypt; he died in Greece; all deaths are one death). Susan has children; Neville mounts rapidly to the conspicuous heights. Life passes. The clouds change perpetually over our houses. I do this, do that, and again do this and then that. Meeting and parting, we assemble different forms, make different patterns. But if I do not nail these impressions to the board and out of the many men in me make one; exist here and now and not in streaks and patches, like scattered snow wreaths on far mountains; and ask Miss Johnson as I pass through the office about the movies and take my cup of tea and accept also my favourite biscuit, then I shall fall like snow and be wasted.

Everything I felt then now seems trivially attributable to the circumstances of the moment, all that anxiety about becoming. Nevertheless in that moment, this seemed to be the greatest challenge of life, the imperative: out of the many men in me make one. In order to do so, I felt, one needed to make the strongest of possible choices; to constrain the future actions of the self. To try by real-life effort to create an effect of the kind that Sarah Constantin describes from her button: guaranteeing future you does “exactly and only what you think you should be doing at that moment”.

It seems to me now that I misread Woolf: that I conflated the desire to make myself into a cohesive whole with the aim of holding on to the self of the moment, and therefore needing to constrain the choices of the future me. What seemed to be how one made a single self (ruling out possible negative futures) now seems both impossible — as I’ve said before, there are very few things one can’t undo, whether your method of choice be self-sabotage or laser tattoo removal — as well as undesirable. My solitary serious (and failed) attempt to act on this led me to feel as though I’d tried to commit violence against myself, as you would have it.

But anyway, to resolve and to align the choices of ones’ future are not the same thing. It seems to me that a single self ought to still have many available paths. Perhaps would just have (in itself, not in its past) coherence and clarity about that which it ‘should’ take?

Yet, say I’m sitting there now, in front of that big (presumably red) button called ‘Do as I Should’. The counter to Romans 7:19, For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Why don’t I push it? What am I afraid of?

I’m afraid that sometimes when I feel like I’m defecting, it’s actually necessary in order to be able to keep getting up in the morning on all those future days. Not always, perhaps not even often, but that the violence would be existentially destructive. Essentially, (taking all questions of the self as fundamentally about continuity through time), I seem to fear that ‘should’ would not keep up with the self temporally.

So it’s still problematic (in the sense of ‘containing a problem’) that even this new Woolfian single self is saddled with a ‘should’ that arises from some combination of intentions and experiences that might be out-of-date, for where else could intention come from but the past?

What can I do right now that isn’t at risk of this? The only neutral, non-coercive option I can see is trying to see choices that aren’t currently evident to myself. Trying to get better at thinking past the thought-stoppers.

I was struck by how often in the archives you imply a reading list, while I try to fudge it from introspection. Well, if there’s something out there that can help things get better, help us make more positive-sum deals with ourselves, trust ourselves, then I’m ready to read it. All my future selves better be grateful.

Anything to get past the continual insistence:

“Here is the pen and the paper; on the letters in the wire basket I sign my name, I, I, and again I.”