The past invades us more and more, There is more of it. It is hard to keep out. The signs of its inundations are everywhere. From Talking Pictures TV, the channel of the year, with its nostalgic looks back at life in the 50s or 60s and focus on the films of the last century to today’s technology which allows us to reconnect with music or documents from before; the early Bowie albums, which not so many years ago were untraceable; old papers that could never have been unearthed but now emerge at the click of a key. You find the past everywhere. You can live there if you want. Can you think in the present without the interferences of the past? Writers can be so addicted to quoting or citing earlier writers to buttress their own authority. This doesn’t help. It mostly clogs the thought. History can hinder as much as it helps. The older you get, of course, and the more your past outweighs your future. It also becomes as mysterious as the future. Your old self is an enigma. Why did you act that way? Who were you then?

In his novel Time Shelters the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov imagines a world where we become so addicted to the past that referenda take place throughout Europe allowing citizens to elect the decade they want to live in. The truth is that as individuals we are always living in a kaleidoscopic time that suits us best, a collage of moments from various pasts. We cherry-pick our contexts just to make today’s reality bearable.

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I have come across this phrase in two Victorian novels. Dickens’s Bleak House and, if I remember correctly, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, or was it Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, I can’t remember. What must have happened is that either Eliot or Hardy copied Dickens, whose Bleak House predates the others, or it was a common, perhaps comic, phrase of the Victorian era. Whatever, I have appropriated the phrase and now use it liberally, for it is true of me. I like to do the same things all the time. I like the same routine on a Saturday morning, or any morning for that matter. In an Indian restaurant I always take Chicken Tandoori. I go to the gym on the same days every week and do practically the same workout only with unvarying variants. I never eat vegetables starting with the letter A. If you tickle my pressure points I will come out with the same pronouncements. I will try and herd most phenomena under the heading of hairdresser syndrome (the fact that hairdressers always have bad haircuts, that is, most people do the jobs they are least suited to do). I soak my feet in the bucket twice a week; Wednesday and Sunday. I never vary.

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I have never worn a moustache. They seem rather perverse to me. They are an odd mix: seedy yet dainty. You see young men with dirty smudges on their upper lip and you wonder what is going through their heads. Surely this object cannot attract a member of the opposite sex, you think. Or of any sex. It is a grubby little thing. If you kissed a man with a moustache it would be like negotiating a bit of shredded wheat on the way in. The only way I could have a moustache, it seems to me, is if I were playing a role. The only moustache role I could possibly play is the cad. Cads have a fairly long moustache that they stroke diabolically as they are plotting their devilish schemes. It might suit me; the kind of dastardly plotter you get in a Thomas Hardy novel sometimes. There are other moustache roles. The Hitler moustache, of course; mostly taboo. The RAF pilot moustache. The thin pencil line moustache; aristocratic. Most of these things are of another time. So it would seem to make sense that they only exist as a kind of fancy dress. And yet men do sport them as permanent features. One would like to get into the mind of such men and find out what their big idea is.

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The dangers from holding a conviction based on how you feel are clear. Our feelings shift. They depend on our age, our experience, where we live (which country, which class, which ethnicity, which sex), our mood. You understand why in the 70s and the 80s that cultural war took place in academia about theory. It was no longer enough to just react viscerally to Shakespeare or Proust because you were just using your own limited viscera; you had to filter your thoughts through Marxism or Feminism or any other ism as a safeguarding action. That was seen as a left wing act. You did not trust your own self.

These days, curiously, the people who trust their own feelings above exterior structures are seen as so-called ‘woke’ and left wing. They feel that they are not male, that they are female. They go on viscera. The argument from how you feel wins out over all others. A little humility might tell us that the human vessel is adrift on a tumultuous deep ocean of culture and it can shift direction at any moment.

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