..However, as a captive of the moral truth, Amery demands a right of resistance against what he calls the anti-moral ‘natural’ or ‘biological’ time that heals all wounds: “What happened, happened. This sentence is just as true as it is hostile to morals and intellect...” Amery took an explicit stance against Nietzsche’s counsel to learn to forget and his notion that history must serve the present and future.
Around two months back I accidently spilt a tiny tumbler of hot tea on my study desk, which in seconds gushed through the rest of the table, onto my laptop, a new Mac. How did this happen? A normal every day morning- I went downstairs to the kitchen, picked up some hot tea in a tumbler, came back to my room with the newspaper, walked towards my desk and placed my tea. Leaning on the desk I noticed that it was sitting a few inches ahead of the wall, so I gave the desk a slight nudge, the rest followed; the table shook causing the tumbler to jerk- the tea falling (flowing, flying!) rapidly across onto the harmless laptop that was shutdown and whose screen was even closed. This tiny spill of tea worth barely three rupees has caused a series of extremely large unfortunate events costing me more than fifty thousand rupees. Such is the nature of an accident; a freak accident.
When I read this sheet, this chosen quote of Amery’s stood out; it amplified the sting I was left with. I cannot claim that this was a crime that deserved justice and I apologize for creating parallels with his life threatening versus my materialistic situation, but in my head all I knew was that I had no option but to go back in time and change what was done. My mind saw no choices: I had to go back and un-nudge that table, that was the only way the situation would achieve justice. I didn’t accept the idea of time. And this is exactly how I relate to Amery’s quote “the time sense of the person trapped in resentment is twisted around, dis-ordered, if you wish, for it desires two impossible things: regression into the past and nullification of what happened.”
For a whole month I was in denial that the tea had spilt on and seeped inside the laptop, even though experts had diagnosed that the logic board and display had to be changed and that it was my only chance of getting the laptop to work. I didn’t acknowledge the spilling as an action of the past. I believed that I possessed power over my action and I could beat this fixed ontological idea of time, all if I could just undo my mistake. The fate of the present and future of my laptop were in my hands because I was planning on reversing time to my past to undo the damage done. My solution for attaining justice in this scenario was by getting the laptop fixed without spending a single rupee on it. So for that one month I ran behind every expert in the city, searching and begging for any manner in which I’d have the laptop organized and proper without paying a sole rupee.
Many of my friends and family kept telling me not to get stuck in the action of the past but to move forward and learn from the experience; I detested the idea of moving forward when I was nowhere in the future. These people who discouraged my fixation of the incident, also unconsciously dissuaded my goal of achieving justice, in whatever manner I needed to. They say when the laptop is ruined, it is an action of the past, if somebody fixes it, then it is an action of the present/future but not a reverse undoing into the past. I know my present was the past- I was living that moment of nudging the table for many weeks ahead, saw no logical reason why people kept explaining these three broken down absolutes of time- past, present and future...” The emphasis on the absence and irreversibility of past and historical injustice endows the time of history with something uncomfortable, something unjust and almost unacceptable in a moral sense.”
In today’s world, if you feel that your mind isn’t sitting in the present then how do you relate to the world outside who’re constantly judging and un-accepting of your state of being categorizing you in the ‘Universal notion’ of time... "The whole history of Western philosophy, according to Derrida, has been influenced by a certain conception of time that puts too much emphasis on the present and the actual to the disadvantage of the absent and in-actual.” Who is to decide what is in-actual?
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