Aging Gracefully

If you're watching a fancy public-broadcast period drama and you hear a character comes from a "very old family", you might be struck by an absurdity. Aren't all families by definition the same age?

Of course, we know what the character means; she means that the family in question has been established for longer. She means the family has a kind of memory developed from continuity of property and status. She is implying that such a privilege is the exception among families rather than the rule.

Recently, I saw Tom Stoppard's Arcadia for the first time. Watching this wonderful and difficult play, I thought about a physical manifestation of the idea of an old family: the grand old English home in which the time-hopping action of the show takes place. I was struck by how particularly English the humanist ghost-hunting is, taking place within the physical structure and contoured by ideas of inheritance of things present. It would be difficult to write such a play in, say, Morocco, even where they have plenty of academics and plenty of beautiful old homes.

Now, Stoppard's play has nothing to do with the non-West, or non-England, and his awareness of his characters' privileged parochialism is clear.

Nevertheless, I think it is significant how masterful works like Stoppard's about themes like the past's habitation of the present depend on a specific kind of intimacy with that past. This comfortable familiarity with old grandeur reflects not just wealth, but the patterns of modernization that affect division of West from non-West, of Western and non-Western "heritage".

In this, I think it is not simply that a few English families legally own the places their ancestors have lived in for centuries. Nor is it only that wealthy families in the non-West, like Edward Said's, have tended to lose their grand old places to settlers. Nor is it only that much of public space in the former colonies like Pakistan or South Africa is organized around control, segregation and tourism into which a postcolonial elite has tended to move comfortably. Nor is it that all the big cities in the Global South have undergone dispossessing transformations like Beijing.

It is rather that the past was disposed very differently in the West than the non-West, even as discourses of heritage and history are supposed to be universals. These concepts flourished creating continuity in the West: an institutional long march to modern maturity. This is in contrast to the world-changing interruption elsewhere that meant continuity, physical or institutional, could not be understood as it was before.

It is wrong to think, as I can hear friends cautioning me, that everyone in the West or non-West looks at the present reminders of the past with the same essential difference. It is wrong to think that modernization has fixed everyone's mind, foreclosing other possibilities. It is wrong to think creativity like Stoppard's comes only in the comfort of the surroundings of the past brought with freedom and empire.

However, for me, in whatever tunnel-visioned state I saw it, Arcadia had as background a relationship between place, time and space. This relationship is about being able to look back on what is one's own. In this ease, of course, tragedy is possible, like in the play. But to believe that one's own past has the integrity of continuity into which one can look back, and to have such a belief validated by the imbalance of history, is something I try to think about even in the presence of a structure of composed with great beauty.