This past summer, as Michael and I were traipsing after my father through Western Europe, we wound up in a café in a small Belgian town called Dinant. Dinant is the furthest west that the Germans got during the Ardennes offensive. It’s a beautiful little town on the Meuse River. We were sitting outside and nursing a couple of local beers in the shade during the peak of the midday heat.
As we sat there, I was trolling through the internet on my phone, and I found a picture of a group of Dinant refugees in front of a building near a bridge. They were fleeing from the advancing Germans. I showed the picture to Michael, and we realized that the bridge in the picture was probably the one that we were looking at over the rims of our beer mugs. In fact, we realized that we were probably sitting just outside the very building that was in the picture. Sure enough, after lunch, I walked across the street and looked back and it was, indeed, the exact spot that was in the picture.
There is a school of thought called Eternalism that states that time does not exist and that all events occur simultaneously. Stand in a place today and sometime in the past, somebody else likely stood in the same spot. In fact, over the millennia, many people probably stood there at one time or another for different reasons. Some may have been deep in thought and others may have been fleeing for their lives, but for that instant, they were in the exact same place. Eternalism says that they are all, if you could pull yourself away from it, there together. Thomas Aquinas, among others, would say that God alone is outside of this “block time” and, therefore, able to view all events that have happened, are happening, and will happen at the same time.
Digging through my family’s papers and photographs has been an almost insurmountable task. I am grateful that there’s so much of it, but I am also aware that it will never be enough. This past couple of weeks I have been concentrating on my Great Uncle Scott and I feel like I’ve gotten to understand him a bit. Online, I have found some vintage pieces he designed, and they are starting to arrive at the apartment. They are something physical of him that I can hold onto. I am now looking into what I know about his parents and his parents’ parents. I have a lot of information about some of them and very little information about others. I have far more information about the men in my past than I do about the women. The men in the family tended to fight in wars so their accomplishments wind up in the historical record. The women tended to stay behind and keep the home fires burning so the historical record doesn’t pay nearly as much attention to them.
What I finally decided to do with all the family papers is to organize them according to person. Each family member now has their own archival envelope. The envelopes are clustered in generational groups and all the envelopes are together in one file box. In effect, I have created a visual representation of Eternalism. All these people from different points in time exist together in one place. Each person is connected to each of the others even though they may never have met and existed centuries apart.
Visiting places where either people have been, or events have occurred in the past, can be a frustrating exercise. Great, you’re in the same place, but how do you access what was there before? Pictures are not nearly enough. They only capture fleeting moments. At least there were cameras during World War II, it’s hard to view the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 today as anything other than a series of paintings. In fact, on the site today, is a gigantic panoramic 360-degree painting that is designed to put you in the middle of it all. It’s equally difficult to imagine World War II unfolding in color because we are so used to seeing it recorded in black and white photographs and newsreel footage. In truth, of course, both conflicts, as well as every other battle in the history of humankind have unfolded in full three-dimensional living color. The blood of fallen soldiers has been equally red and equally real no matter when in history it flowed.
Thinking of human history that way, the fact that so many battles over time have happened in the same place becomes even more interesting. What is it about that land in Belgium that keeps drawing people in to fight for it, generation after generation? Did the first battle, there, trigger the repetition, or was there something inherent in that place before that that made men want to assume control over it?
William “Buck” Hester is the almost mythic ancestor that my family felt was responsible for siring most of the Hester clan in the United States. He was one of a dozen kids and he, in turn, was responsible for at least a dozen more kids himself. The offspring from all those people are now legion. Find a Hester and they will probably be able to trace their lineage back to old Buck.
Buck was born in 1780 but he was far from being the first Hester in North America. Five generations of Hester men before him were already here. Francis Hester, the scion of the 5th generation before Buck, was born in Oxfordshire, England in 1628. He died, we think, over here in what was then the British American colonies. Francis’ great-great-grandfather Andrew Hester was the first Hester male who arrived in England from Bavaria. His father, Johannes Hester, was born in Bavaria in 1490 and died there in 1558. Johannes is the 16th generation of Hester men who came before me. While that’s an impressive 500 years of traceable history, it is still just a tiny segment of the entire line.
I am ever aware that if any of those people had made different decisions during their lives that I simply wouldn’t be here. The unlikeliness of my existence is almost overwhelming. The physical remains of all those generations of my family fit snuggly into one or two plastic tubs. Looking at the box of envelopes sitting on the living room floor is truly sobering. Each one represents a person who made a collection of uncountable little changes in direction. I will never know most of them. However, if there is any validity to the theory of Eternalism, then they are just as much here as I am. We just can’t get at each other.
In Boston last week, even though I was walking through the same areas on the Harvard campus that my great uncle Scott had walked through, I wasn’t seeing the same things that he saw. There are buildings there now, that weren’t there then and buildings that Scott could walk into that have since been torn down. There were things there, however, that both of us could see. Buildings certainly but also trees. Trees’ lives can last through many generations of human ones.
Jack Finney, in his classic time-travel book, Time and Again, purposefully set his scenes a century in the past in buildings and places that still existed for the reader in 1970 when it was published. I can remember during my college years walking through what in 1870 was called the Lady’s Mile in Chelsea. I remember really looking at the buildings that were once major department stores in the center of the city and trying to make the past come alive in my mind. While I noticed many details that I might not have taken in before, I stayed firmly and resolutely in the present. I couldn’t escape it.
No matter how much I read about my ancestors, I can never fully put myself in their shoes because I can’t really get past my own personal viewpoint. My uncle Scott can write something in a letter that I find difficult to stomach in 2022, but that might not necessarily be him, it might just be his time. So many things societally were different seventy years ago, that even were we able to meet up outside of this “block time,” despite sharing many interests, we may not be able to stand each other. I am as much a product of this time as he was of his.
Yesterday, I found a letter that a friend of my father’s wrote to my sister after my father passed away. In it, she describes how difficult it was for my father to accept my being gay. “He was upset and dismayed about Richard’s homosexuality. He said to me that lesbians didn’t bother him, but men did. I blew! Quietly, of course. I worked and worked on him and, he came around. That’s very much to his credit. He rose above and beyond his prejudices and joined the rest of us.”
While I didn’t know this was how my father felt until I read this, I must have sensed it because I never explicitly came out to him back in the day. I came out to my sister and then to my mother somewhat later, but I never actually sat down and talked about it with my dad. At some point, I just assumed that he knew and started behaving accordingly. I know that however difficult it was for him at the beginning that he did come around. He adored Michael and I think went peacefully to his grave knowing that we were together.
That letter wasn’t anything that I was ever supposed to read and therein lies another problem with the family material I have. Very few things that are written down by anybody are completely true. We write for our audience – emphasizing some things and ignoring others. As honest as my father, I think, tried to be when writing about his life, he just didn’t go there much of the time.
Reading what his friend wrote to my sister about me, gives me a slightly better insight into him. He very much loved and admired his uncle Scott. Even though homosexuality probably wasn’t talked about, it must have been omnipresent. A lot of energy went into euphemisms in the family. This also was a time when people like Liberace were huge stars and, as remarkable as it seems to our eyes today, lived in the closet. Generations of people did not see what was right in front of them. It was agreed by the greater whole not to see what they were looking at and so they didn’t. That Scott took his own life, I am sure informed my father’s prejudice against same-sex relationships.
It's not up to me to judge my ancestors. I am content just trying to understand them somewhat within the context of the times they lived in. Presentism is another ism that maintains that there is just the present, that is ever-changing. Under Presentism, all history and prior thought are viewed and judged through contemporary morals and convictions. Tearing down statues of Confederate generals is a great example of Presentism. So much has the potential for getting lost that way. I prefer the idea of Eternalism where each era and the actions of the people during it can be assessed without the interference of other era’s beliefs.
The past is all around us. We ignore it at our peril. It has a lot to teach us even if the lessons aren’t always easy to hear. The challenge is how to make our history seem current and not just like another fairy tale from long ago.
In 1912, the panoramic painting of Waterloo was designed to immerse the spectator in the middle of the battle to make it seem real. The Holocaust memorial in Washington D.C. issues each person who enters it a different passport of a real person who lived through that time. As you walk through the chronological exhibits, you learn what your person was doing at different points on the timeline. In the end, you learn their fate. It is a way to personalize that time by looking at it through the eyes of somebody who was there. At Verdun, they have set up virtual reality stations as another way to put visitors inside the event of the World War I bloodbath. VR is not quite there yet but may, eventually, be an effective way to experience other moments in time.
I realize that my interest in figuring out how to bridge the gap between then and now has been there my whole life. What is theatre, after all, but a way into moments in other people’s lives?
As imperfect a method of discovery as it is, I am going to continue to travel to the places where people in my family lived. In some ways, it’s as physically close as I can get to the people who came before me. Sea sickness is sometimes avoided when you can focus on a fixed point on the horizon like a mountain. I feel closer if I fixate on something present at both times. Standing in front of the doorway to the dormitory where Scott lived during his years at Harvard, I knew we were both in the same place.
The only thing separating us was time.
So very “thought full”. I too have that urge to connect with those that came before me and the times in which they lived. I commend you for truly taking your time and really digging in - it’s a tremendous task. Part of me subscribes to the idea that if you talk about those who have passed they remain more present. Hard to explain what I mean, but you eluded to it in this post. Thank you.