2
Modelling the Human Life Course

Ageing and begetting

Does life take you any nearer to your ancestors, or does it draw you ever farther away from them? Do you follow in their footsteps or face determinedly in the other direction? Are your ancestors ahead of you, beckoning you on towards the future, or are they left behind, receding ever farther into the past? And your descendants? Are they at your heels, or have they already overtaken, leaving you trailing in their wake? Which way is younger, and which older? These are perplexing questions. I have already compared the passage of generations to the winding rope, of which every life is a strand. Let us commence our inquiry, then, from this analogy. We might allow the rope to run through our fingers, at least so far as it has been wound until now, reciting the names of ancestors in succession as we tell the story of who begat whom. The names are strung along, with earliest ancestors in the lead, followed by later ones. The rope is, quite literally, a record: memory rewound. And surely, you observe, the narrative runs as life does, from past to present, and will continue into the future as the rope winds on.

That may indeed be how it looks from the outside. What would happen, however, if you took up a perspective from within? Imagine yourself as one of the strands. As you proceed through life, ageing as you go, you leave a trail behind you. Picture the trail as a string of footsteps, spooling out from beneath your feet, with your earliest steps farthest in the rear, followed by later ones. Always ahead of you are your forebears, who have handed the baton to you to carry on in the same direction. They are already now where you will be, standing for the future towards which you are heading. And behind come your offspring, now stepping where you once were, so long ago. They stand for the past. In the interval between them lies the ageing process. This process, however, is proceeding in a direction contrary to that of the genealogical narrative. For your ancestors are now before you and your descendants at your back. It is as though you were standing in a queue, which is ever shuffling forward as the rope continues to wind. As I have tried to show in Figure 2.1, ageing is the inverse of begetting.

The etymology of the word ‘queue’ offers a clue to this reversal of perspective. Derived from the Latin cauda, meaning ‘tail’, it was initially extended to refer to the stalks of plants and to plaits of twisted hair, and thence to people standing in line to take their turn. Thus, just as ageing inverts begetting, the queue inverts the tail. Place yourself, then, in the queue, with your predecessors ahead and successors behind. Not all these people, of course, may still, or yet, be alive and present in the immediately sensible world. But even those who have ‘passed’, as we might say – if only from the perspective of an onlooker – continue to exert a hold over their followers, who are beholden to them, even as those who have yet to be born will be beholden to yourself and your contemporaries. The ancestors still beckon, even as you await the coming of descendants. In the meantime, and like everyone else, you process through life, measuring out your days in steps towards a future which, like a spatial horizon, nevertheless recedes as fast as you approach it. Suppose, however, that you are commanded to turn around, through 180 degrees. What then?

2.1 Ageing and begetting (Roman numerals indicate successive filiations)

Everything changes. For the people who once went before you are now at your back, while you now find yourself face to face with those who were once following after. The future, which had formerly stretched away into the distance along ancestral paths, as sketched in the top row of Figure 2.2, now appears to be heading on a collision course straight towards you. Meanwhile the ancestors, upon whom you have now turned your back, recede ever farther into the past. Their time is over. The very act of conversion, shown in the bottom row of the sketch, stakes a claim for the present. The present is a hold-up, an attempt to arrest the passage of time, to bring it to a standstill. But no generation can hold its ground indefinitely. Eventually, the press becomes too great, and it is either pushed aside or forced to move on, to make way for the next generation, which promptly does the same, turning its back on the one preceding only to face its own successor. The moment it turns, it takes the stand of a new present. History, then, reappears as a punctuated series of generational turning points, each claiming the present for itself.

2.2 The turn on the present and the future’s past

To join the queue is to observe what we rightly call a tradition. For the proper meaning of tradition – from the Latin tradere, to ‘hand over’, as in a relay – is not to live in the past but to follow your predecessors into the future. You may retrace old ways, but every trace is an original movement to be followed in its turn. It is the same with storytelling, in which the direction of live performance is inverted in the temporal flow of the narrative. Even as the words fall from your lips, they recede into the slipstream of your onward movement. Strictly speaking, then, to turn your back on tradition is not to relinquish what is already past. It is rather to deny the promise that tradition offers for the future. In other words, the ‘pastness’ of tradition is not given a priori, but is produced in the very act of conversion that stakes a claim to the present. This same turnaround, moreover, creates a future which, from the perspective of those still following traditional ways, is nothing if not backward-looking, sacrificing the possibility of ceaseless beginning for the finality of predetermined ends. Such is the way of modernity.

The Angel of History

This is a way that measures time by the clock. Why, after all, does the clock tick? Its revolving movement, driven by the vital force of the spring which wants always to unwind, or the weight of the pendulum as it gravitates to earth, is periodically stopped on the cog of an escapement wheel by a ratchet, only to be released again. The tick we hear is the sound of the ratchet’s engagement with the cog. And the measured time of the clock lies not in the unwinding of the spring but in the series of stoppages, each marked by a tick. So, likewise, as diagrammed schematically in Figure 2.3, do generations mark time by converting its onward movement into a punctuated series of escapements. With life, as with time, the flow becomes a stutter. When life escapes, the entire series shifts by one notch. The foregoing generation, far from moving on into the future, vanishes into the oblivion of the past, while the generation to come pivots to take its place in the present. Thus does every present generation, having turned its back to the past, position itself as a gatekeeper to the future.

2.3 Lived time and clock time

That’s why there is such a compulsion to replace the old with the new: it proves that time is passing and history is being made. Nothing, indeed, catches the modern imagination more than the idea of step change. For, in the eyes of the present, the future figures less as a path to be followed than as a problem to be solved. Had it been solved by preceding generations, now already past, there would be nothing for the present to do. They would have only to fall into line with a project mapped out for them in advance. Such compliance would amount to the renunciation of any future they could call their own. The present’s ownership of the future, therefore, depends on the assumption that the past got it wrong. This is the default assumption of the modern age: that the road from the past is paved with errors. We always know better than they did. In science and technology, we will refute their conjectures to replace them with inventions of our own. In architecture, we will abandon their designs in favour of the latest innovations. In education, we will cast aside the old order and induct students into the new.

Yet the inevitable implication is that the solutions of the present will turn out in due course to have been equally mistaken. And while the generation that proposes these solutions – that is, our generation – will pass, the impacts of applying them can linger, as have the applications of generations preceding, leaving longlasting scars not just on hearts and minds, but on the world around us. Every generation, then, is fated to live among the ruins of the now obsolete futures proposed by generations past, perhaps only half-constructed before being demolished to make way for the next. If you were a celestial being, eternally standing guard at the gate at which these erstwhile futures pass, one by one, into history, you would witness an immense pileup as future after future, crashing into the present, is reduced to rubble. You would be the personification of Angelus Novus, The Angel of History, as famously depicted in a monoprint by the artist Paul Klee, dating from 1920, reproduced in Figure 2.4. A year later, the print was purchased by the philosopher-critic Walter Benjamin, and in a fragment penned in 1940, shortly before his own suicide as a fugitive from Nazism, Benjamin described the Angel thus:

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees...