There Also I Meet Myself

Reminiscence, Augustine’s halls, and the last rooms of 2001: A Space Odyssey

By the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dave Bowman has left the spacecraft. He stands in a spacesuit in a white room that resembles a hotel; it has French furniture, the floor is lit from below, and there is a bathroom, a table, and a bed. Through a door, he can see an older man sitting down to eat. The older man hears something, stands up, and goes to that door. He then looks back toward where the younger man had been standing. The pod is no longer there, and the first Bowman has now become the second.

Kubrick never explains this through dialogue. Bowman doesn’t just get older as we watch him. Each time he finds an older version of himself already in the room next door, looking back at him. In the final minutes of the film, a life is turned into rooms, and a man becomes someone he has to look at.

That image has always struck me. It is only recently that I realized Augustine had spoken of something similar. He was not thinking of a film, and he was not trying to stage a life as a set of rooms. He was a bishop writing before God, in Book X of the Confessions, trying to give an account of his own mind. He has already looked at the senses, at the inner life, at the question of how a man can seek God at all. Then he comes to memory, and the description is not a theory in the abstract. He says that when he enters that interior, he does not merely recall that he was once present at some event. He meets himself there.

“There too I meet myself and recall myself—what, when, or where I did something, and how I was affected when I did it.”

Reminiscence is more like that meeting than ordinary recall. You are not simply retrieving a fact but are coming face to face with the person who experienced it, and at the same time you are someone else—that is, the one who now must state what the time was.

Each by its own gate

Augustine does not regard memory as though it were contained in a single box. Instead, he speaks of an interior space so vast that its end cannot be reached. Heaven, earth, and the sea can be found there. Things enter by specific means: colors through the eyes, sounds through the ears, odors through the nose, and tastes through the mouth. “Each entering in by its own gate and there being stored up.”

He won’t let you mix the image with the thing. The objects themselves are not remembered, only their likenesses. The world remains just as it is. The mind retains only what it can recall later on. That is why he can tell the lilies apart from the violets without having to smell them and can sing without tensing his throat. The store within is very large. Yet it is still not the world.

The final suite in Clarke’s book 2001 consists of that type of copy. The books have titles and blank pages, and the packages resemble food. The room has been assembled from television broadcasts by creatures who wanted Bowman to feel at home, but they did not know what a home is. Kubrick later referred to the set as a sort of zoo: an inaccurate imitation of French architecture, like the fake habitats built for animals in which no one has ever lived.

Memory does the same thing. It creates a second world for us, composed of images. It lets us recover the first world and begin treating the copy as sufficient.

The two men

In Augustine, the key point is the encounter. There is the man who ate, spoke, desired, sinned, and felt as he felt; and there is the man currently moving about those inner rooms, bringing up one memory while pushing aside those which enter without invitation.

The first man experienced the event. The second must assess it—when it took place, where, what emotions he had, and what it meant. That process is not impartial. The later version of oneself may excuse the earlier one, bring him to trial, clean him up, or state the truth. He might regard that earlier life as a case study. He might also see it as something that really happened to a person.

Wordsworth was aware of the division. In The Prelude, he describes two kinds of consciousness: his own and another being. Tintern Abbey is composed from the point of view of that second self. The young man who had once walked over those hills is not the man standing by the Wye many years later, attempting to understand himself. The landscape has continued to act upon him while he was away. The poem is not a successful recovery of youth. It is an older mind reviewing the situation and realizing that he can no longer become the first man again.

What Augustine does not cover is something Proust adds. At times, the past does not wait to be recalled. It is the taste of the madeleine, the stumble on the uneven stones: the earlier world comes on its own. The later self does not go and retrieve Combray. Combray appears and, for a moment, the man who had thought he only possessed images is thrown by the thing itself. He still has to explain what took place. He still has to go through the next hour.

What the film will not do

Kubrick will show you the split. He won’t turn it into a confession. The Bowman who is in the helmet sees the Bowman at the table. The Bowman at the table looks in the direction of the door. A glass falls and shatters. He turns, and now the bed contains a still older man, almost dead, pointing at the monolith. They say nothing. The man having dinner gives the astronaut no advice. The dying man does not explain himself to the man at dinner. Each one takes the other’s place.

Later, Kubrick stated that beings of pure intelligence take Bowman and keep him in that room, allowing the rest of his life to pass there without ordinary time. When they finish with him, they alter him and send him back. He regards this as an old mythic pattern. The final action is the same kind of reach that started with the bone and the slab. There is no reply given. There is the Star Child above the Earth.

We remember the scene because it captures some truth about looking back, and then it ends. Memory usually shows us an older version of ourselves who is already present. You can’t question that earlier self the way you would a friend. He doesn’t sit down to reply. You can only see him. If the story is nothing more than a man appearing in a series of stages and then being replaced by another being, with no one to whom the life has to be told, then the film has stated the fact and declined the responsibility that goes with it.

Hunting and chewing

To reminisce is not the same as having a memory. A memory may come without your permission—for example, a smell, a face, or a sentence which you never sent. Reminiscing is what you do afterward, rather than waiting around. You actively look for it, talk about it, and place the earlier self somewhere he can be seen. Aristotle is still helpful. Memory is what has not departed. Recollection is the search for something after it has left.

The search has a certain atmosphere. When examining something, one asks about what happened, what one loved, and what one did, before allowing that particular hour to be included among the rest. Rumination holds the hour in the moving mouth. It doesn’t desire a fixed place but rather wants to go over it again and again. Much of what people call reminiscing is only the same hour being gone over again, made pleasant enough to keep. From the inside, the two can seem identical, since both involve a company with a past. Yet they are not the same thing.

You never manage to recall things entirely by yourself, as you suppose. Even if no one else is present in the room, the later version of yourself is either talking to the earlier one or is discussing him with some third party. The point, then, is who that third party may be. An audience. A jury that you have chosen. No one. God.

Zoo and confession

Kubrick and Augustine are not doing the same thing here.

According to Kubrick, Bowman is in the suite so that he can be studied. The beings who have placed him there do not talk to him. He ages in their presence. They then transform him while he remains in the room. The older versions of himself are stages in the process, not people with whom he can communicate.

Confession starts from the same fracture. The man who lived the hour and the man who remembers him are both before God. The first cannot clear himself. The second cannot finish the verdict. God was in the original hour, and he is not one more picture filed in the mind. The decisive turn in Book X is not Augustine admiring the size of his memory. It is his decision not to stop there. “I will pass even beyond this power of mine which is called memory… that I may approach unto Thee.” Animals remember well enough to find their way back. A man can meet himself in memory and still know that memory is not what he was made for….I think this is crucial…..

Remember, and do not make a home of it

Memory is not left to be merely a mood. “Remember” is a command, and so is “do not forget.” Israel is not being asked to create a certain atmosphere. They are being asked not to lose the actions that made them a people. Forgetfulness in this context is not a pleasant mistake. It is a covenant failure.

Memory also belongs to someone else. “God remembered Noah.” “He has remembered his covenant.” This does not imply that information was fetched from heaven. It means God turned toward a particular person and took action. Our act of remembering should be more like that than a visit to the inner chambers of the mind. We remember so that we may act. We remember a person so he may not be forgotten. We remember the dead because they can’t repay us. Kierkegaard considered the last of these to be a pure test of love for this very reason.

Yet the same books prevent memory from becoming a home. Isaiah can instruct Israel to remember what God has done, and at the same time, in that part of his prophecy, tell them not to hold on to the things of the past. Lot’s wife is the case when looking back stops someone in their place. After the disaster, Virgil allows Aeneas to say the other thing: maybe one day it will be helpful to remember even this. The point is whether looking back causes a person to move forward or leaves him standing where he is.

The Hebrew term is zikkaron, and it underlies the Greek expression anamnesis in the context of the Last Supper. It is not a personal recreation of an event from long ago. Rather, it involves keeping God’s finished action alive so it can be made present to those who observe the remembrance. The phrase “Do this in remembrance of me” does not mean that one should form a mental image of the evening of Thursday in Jerusalem. It means that one should take part in what Christ has accomplished. That action is not past in the same way that last year’s weather is past. Usually, nostalgia works in the opposite direction: the later self remains in the rooms it remembers and tries to make the present resemble them.

The map and the duration

If Iain McGilchrist is to be of any help, we must not ask him to explain any more than he is able. The two hemispheres do not divide up memory between them. Rather, they deal with it in different ways. The left hemisphere is comfortable with what is already known: parts that can be managed, maps, and sequences. It can describe a life in terms of states: the helmet, the table, the bed; youth, age, and death. The right hemisphere is more concerned with duration, with things that are still alive as complete entities, with a particular face, and with a self whose past and future are part of a single narrative rather than a series of separate scenes. Music is closer to that hemisphere, as is the feeling that time passes and is not merely a sequence of rooms.

The final movement of 2001 illustrates what a life becomes when it is broken down into these separate scenes. The images remain with you, but they omit the usual continuous experience of being the same person over time. After his mental tour, Augustine still hears a child in a garden saying tolle lege, while Bowman hears a fork on a plate and the floor.

A Christian view of the mind must include both types of attention. We need names, dates, doctrine, and the habit of remembering things accurately. Faith does not mean that we can be vague about facts. On the contrary, it means that we do not allow the facts to be the only aspect of our lives. Memory can go wrong in more than one way. It may become the official version of events—the tale that always wins, the accepted account of better times, the past treated as if it were property—and it can also become so diluted that the present has no world at all, only a note to the effect that something once happened.

When the later self looks at the earlier one, he carries out his work without turning him into a display.

What it is for, and when it should stop

The habit of recalling the past in a restaurant setting is genuine. Two people will tell an old story until it comes to the forefront, and at times, until it becomes false. That is not the fullest extent the word can go to.

At its full intensity, reminiscing involves thinking over again what we already know in the body. A man can experience his past as present and thus meet the person he was without remaining that person. This meeting marks the beginning of the examination. It may remain no more than an observation, as it does in Kubrick’s suite. It might develop into a confession. Or it might take the form of the Eucharist, a kind of remembrance in the strong sense, not since the Church is attached to old objects, but because Christ’s finished work is not a keepsake.

It must cease when the hour has been adequately described so that it can take its place. It must stop when looking back no longer leads you to a person, a people, or to God, but merely brings you back into the room. Augustine concludes his examination of memory by departing from it. Clearly see the earlier self. State what was done and what it was like. Do not move in. Rather, go on to the God who was with the man during that hour and who is also with the man who remembers it, and who is not kept in the mind as just another image.

There I also meet myself. Then I go on.