"White Teeth" snow and the relationship between past and future

Snow is a beautiful thing, but it too quickly becomes a history book–a journal of the past. It too quickly becomes slushy and muddy and complicated. Even when it’s been hardened by a cycle of thawing and refreezing, it bears the imprints of tires that have rolled through, of a tailbone that has made precipitous and intimate acquaintance with the ground.

It is a naked thing. It lies bare for us to leave our causal marks on it even when we’re long gone. And, just like those of history itself, the causes eventually multiply and intertwine so much that they are impossible to pull apart. History is not string cheese.

In a way, our lives are like a layer of snow on the city of Durham. But not freshly fallen snow, mind you. More like snow with which clumsy boots and foolhardy cars have tampered. We are living monuments to the forces that have shaped us and to the causal tides of history that we are forced to inherit. We are molded by hands unaware of the fact that they are even molding something, much less that their work will mix with others’. The result: human beings are complicated sculptures exhibiting the work of many hands. Beautiful, for the most part, but complicated.

What should our relationship be to what has come before us, given how profoundly we are shaped by it? How do we acknowledge its moonlike gravitational tug and not 1) get complacent about the “progress” we’ve made or 2) in acknowledging history, let the nightmare repeat itself?

This is probably the biggest literary, philosophical, political, ethical, etc. question of the last century and the new millennium. In particular, it’s a central issue in the novel I’m currently reading, "White Teeth", by Zadie Smith. One of the main characters, a Bengali Muslim named Samad Miah Iqbal, has an affair with an Englishwoman. His co-worker dooms the relationship before it even starts—“There’s too much history,” he says. Indeed, the relationship ends quickly, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Samad is imprisoned by his history—he spends the better part of his life trying to bring proper historical importance to his great-grandfather Mangal Pande. His obsession reduces him to a shell, a mouthpiece for the past and not much more. But the characters who are unburdened by history in the novel aren’t model humans, either. Samad’s foil in this regard is a Jewish atheist biologist named Marcus Chalfen whose great scientific project is called FutureMouse. Chalfen’s amnesiac commitment is to the inevitable march of scientific progress at whatever cost. This is clearly no way to live either.

What, then, are we to make of this? I think the way out is to realize the fallacy that both sides are making—the ascription of a nomic necessity to history, the idea that its patterns are somehow laws of nature. It’s definitely not true, for example, that brown/white relationships need to evolve necessarily along lines of subject/imperialist, as if one were oxygen and the other hydrogen, the one by its very nature tugging the other’s electron into its own orbit. By the same token, the story of science and its relationship to society isn’t one of pure “progress;” new isn’t always better. That’s the mistake that music historians made for a while, thinking Beethoven to be better than Mozart, and so on.

The moral of the story is that history is an accident. Humans are not charged particles, attracting or repelling each other according to some inverse-square law of force. Sure, you can talk about causes and effects. The assassination of Francis Ferdinand caused the Great War, but it could’ve turned out otherwise. Gavrilo Princip almost didn’t kill the archduke, and what’s more, he could have stayed home that day and masturbated (If the censors object to this one, let it be noted that it's a perverse world we live in where blowing one's wad is less acceptable to talk about than blowing someone's brains out). The point is that in no way was the war a metaphysical inevitability, even if it was a practical one. Tire tracks in the snow are not there by some design on anybody’s part—they’re simply the byproducts of somebody trying to get wherever they wanted to go. Likewise, history isn’t History—a grand story with an arc and an ending point. It’s just the byproduct of an enormous skein of human interaction. That’s not to say we can’t draw important cautionary tales from it—such and such conditions are likely to produce absolutism, genocide, etc., and we want to avoid that. But to promote these tales to the level of laws of nature is like saying that I will only buy blue pairs of pants in the future because I have a couple in my wardrobe already; the patterns of history are not tight enough correspondences to be lawlike in their force. We will all remember this snowfall long after the snow has melted away and the tracks are long gone. The next time snow falls on Durham, though, its tracks will tell of a different possible world made actual.

Eugene Rabinovich is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Friday.