• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 295 0

how to keep busy at an enterprise when there’s nothing to do. In fixation, our make-work consists of active waiting, clock-watching, marking time. This strategy is unsuitable for reversion, since there’s nothing to wait for. Everything has already happened. Here the problem of how to keep busy is solved with a remarkably elegant stroke. We invent a ghostly universe of past-conditional events—of might-have-beens and should-have-dones—in which we can work arduously on the no-longer-existing issue for as long as we like. Sparing no effort and no ingenuity, we devise plans for how we might have won the heart of the boy or girl we didn’t dare to approach in high school. We prove with Talmudic precision that we should have received an inheritance that went to someone else.

Reversion is the I-should-have disease.

Not all thinking about the past is reversionary. We may have a historian’s or a novelist’s interest in analyzing what is over and done with. We may review the past in order to avoid making the same mistakes again. We may simply enjoy a recreational fantasy of what might have been, just as we might watch a television show. These cases are easy to distinguish from true reversion. When we’re trapped in reversion, our thoughts are still bent on the attainment of the missed goal. We act as though the obstacle to gratification were still before us instead of behind us—as though it could conceivably give way if only we pressed against it long enough and hard enough. Of course we don’t consciously believe this. We’re guided by an unconscious superstition.

On the other hand, when our interest in the past is historical, novelistic, practical, or recreational, we drop the old goal altogether and take up a new one. Amusing ourselves with a fantasy of high school popularity is a very different matter from striving hopelessly toward the goal of having been popular. The first is a tepid pleasure, the second a heartache. The specific ideas that cross our mind may even be the same in both cases: “If I’d asked her to the prom … if I hadn’t been so fat …” But it’s only in reversion that these thoughts are marshaled in the service of a futile campaign to grasp at what no longer exists.

In both reversion and fixation, we often give vent to our displeasure. In reversion, we mutter incessantly to our unfortunate theater companions about having arrived late. In fixation, we grumble about arriving early and having to wait. These complaints are entirely useless. But not all complaining is in vain. It’s useful to distinguish here between complaining and lamenting. Complaining is the more general term, referring to any expression of displeasure with the course of events. Lamenting is complaining about what can’t be changed. Complaints that aren’t mere lamentations may be instrumental in getting things done. This is why there are complaints departments. But there would be no point in having departments of lamentation, where people go to bewail unalterable fates.

Nevertheless there are religious and psycho-therapeutic institutions that do a brisk trade in lamentation services. The reason they stay in business is easy to understand. Their customers eventually get tired of lamenting and turn to other affairs, whereupon their increased sense of well-being is attributed to the potency of the lamentation. But they could have felt as well right from the start by skipping the lamenting stage and turning to other affairs immediately. Of course this is difficult for many people to do. The habit of ruminating over past misfortunes is as deeply ingrained as the habit of worrying about the future. Often the attempt to engage in other activities is simply unsuccessful. We try to enjoy the company of the lover we’re with, but are haunted by the face of the one we lost. Lamentation isn’t a cure for our problem, however. It’s the disease.

Reversion is no less a trap after great calamities than after small disappointments. When the thousands who have died in a natural disaster are buried, there are again dishes to wash, letters to write, children to tell stories