TRAPPED IN THE PRESENT TENSE

Rescuing the past to inform the present.

Lamenting a culture “prone to forgetfulness” and characterized by rapidly accelerating events, Brooks asserts the need to frame experience in history. “The most useful formulation going forward,” she writes, “may be a phrase, just four words, easy to remember when all the details have disappeared. It will likely as not apply to almost any conceivable contingency.” Those words: “Here we go again.” Considering the apparent eruption of gun violence, for example, Brooks notes that the nearly 2,000 mass shootings that occurred in the U.S. between 2014 to 2019 emerged from a nation beset by violence and awash in guns even since its earliest days. In 1966—three years after the JFK assassination and with scenes of the Vietnam War widely televised—Charles Whitman, a 25-year-old architectural engineering student, climbed a tower at the University of Texas and enacted the first modern mass shooting, killing 16 and wounding 23. Therefore, writes the author, subsequent mass shooting—Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Columbine, Las Vegas—may not have been as random as they seemed. As Brooks excavates the past, she considers the changing natures of secrecy and privacy as well as the impetus to self-disclosure that has impelled obsessive diarists for generations. She looks at the ubiquity of data collection, asking what statistics reveal and what they hide. Although thousands of snapshots amassed on smartphones record “fitful movements of memory,” neither data nor snapshots, Brooks believes, can capture the fullness of stories: Only stories can keep the past from becoming “an abstraction.” “As oblivion approaches,” she writes, “it may be time to go old school, to tell stories that slow the acceleration down, to practice acts of true attention. In this way, we might keep alive one of the only old questions that still matters: How did all this happen?”

A digressive, lyrical meditation on the meaning of memory.