What do you mean it's just a phase?

April 20, 2009 9:27 AM

Please point me to some examples of people/characters imploring their future selves not to forget, diminish, or dismiss the experiences of the present self.

Novels, non-fiction, poetry, film = all good.

I left the question open-ended because there could be a lot of different contexts, but the basic scenario is one in which a person recognizes the transience of the present and insists on the importance of what they're currently going through, no matter what difference in perspective the future brings.

Examples that don't quite follow this "message to the future" format, but which still evoke a sense of the impermanence of the present, would still be helpful.

Thanks!

posted by Beardman to media & arts (21 comments total)

The amazing and terrifying short story The Professor's Teddy Bear by Theodore Sturgeon.
posted by hermitosis at 9:30 AM on April 20

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure was full of stuff like this. For example, something like "OK, after a garbage can falls from the sky and knocks out this bad guy who is pointing a gun at us, we gotta remember to get a garbage can, go back in time to now, climb up on the roof, and drop the garbage can on this guy."

WHAM!

"Excellent!"
posted by Flunkie at 9:39 AM on April 20

Memento, with the "tattoo facts" and the reliance on captioned photographs.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 9:44 AM on April 20

My favorite Star Trek TNG Episode: "Tapestry"

Three Sentence Summary:

1. Picard gets a chance to go back in time and change some regrettable past actions.

2. Said actions change the future, and Picard is returned to the present as an unspectacular mid-level scientist whom his superiors (Riker, Troi) view as lacking ability and initiative.

3. Picard realized that his youthful indiscretions made up a part of his personality that was necessary for him to showcase his leadership and become a Starfleet captain.

Q says:

That Picard never had a brush with death, never came face to face with his own mortality, never realized how fragile life is or how important each moment must be, so his life never came into focus. He drifted through much of his career, with no plan or agenda, going from one assignment to the next, never seizing the opportunities that presented themselves. He never led the away team on Milika III to save the ambassador, or took charge of the Stargazer's bridge when its captain was killed. And no one ever offered him a command. He learned to play it safe. And he never, ever got noticed by anyone.



More detail at the episode's Wikipedia page
posted by VTCarl at 10:15 AM on April 20

Borges wrote about this kind of thing a lot. His short stories "The Other" and "August 25, 1983" both describe a surreal encounter between the author/narrator and a much younger past version of himself.

As for stories about the impermanence of the present -- I want to say that all Borges stories are about this. In particular I'd recommend "The Witness," which is about the images and experiences that are lost forever each time someone dies; or perhaps "Delia Elena San Marco," which deals with the meaning of saying good-bye, and whether nor not the soul is immortal. You can find all of these in the collected fictions.
posted by ludwig_van at 10:21 AM on April 20

A variant of what you're describing...

In the film version of Lost in Space, an alternate-future grown-up Will Smith communicates via wormhole-thingy with his "present" child self and family. Before sacrificing himself to save them, he asks them to "Remember me."
posted by Joe Beese at 10:31 AM on April 20

The note that gets written to the mad professor at the end of Back to the Future, which he rips up but later rescues.

The Time Traveler's wife may have something for you.
posted by Pattie at 10:35 AM on April 20

What first popped in my head…

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

-Mark Twain
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 10:40 AM on April 20 [1 favorite has favorites]

VTCarl's episode is probably closer to what you're looking for but "Cause and Effect" is another ST:TNG message-to-future-selves episode.
posted by txvtchick at 11:03 AM on April 20

Be Here Now
posted by Roach at 11:04 AM on April 20

Jonathan Swift wrote at age 32 a list of resolutions for his old age:


When I come to be old.


Not to marry a young Woman.
Not to keep young Company unless they reely desire it.
Not to be peevish or morose, or suspicious.
Not to scorn present Ways, or Wits, or Fashions, or Men, or War, &c.
Not to be fond of Children, or let them come near me hardly.
Not to tell the same story over and over to the same People.
Not to be covetous.
Not to neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness.
Not to be over severe with young People, but give Allowances for their youthfull follyes and weaknesses.
Not to be influenced by, or give ear to knavish tatling servants, or others.
Not to be too free of advise, nor trouble any but those that desire it.
To desire some good Friends to inform me wch of these Resolutions I break, or neglect, and wherein; and reform accordingly.
Not to talk much, nor of my self.
Not to boast of my former beauty, or strength, or favor with Ladyes, &c.
Not to hearken to Flatteryes, nor conceive I can be beloved by a young woman, et eos qui hereditatem captant, odisse ac vitare.
Not to be positive or opiniative.
Not to sett up for observing all these Rules ; for fear I should observe none.


Italo Calvino took it as inspiration for his "Six Memos for the Next Millenium", what was going to be the 1985-86 Charles Eliot Norton lecture series at Harvard, glossing on a list of literary (though not only) virtues he suggests to an aging world:

1. Lightness
2. Quickness
3. Exactitude
4. Visibility
5. Multiplicity

He never delivered them and died before writing the last one, the subject of which was going to be consistency.
posted by nereis at 11:05 AM on April 20 [2 favorites has favorites]

Over the course of a few episodes near the end of Cowboy Bebop, Faye Valentine receives a videotaped message that she made for herself as a young girl. At that point in the series she is recovering from amnesia and trying to figure out who she was before becoming a hard-shelled bounty hunter and gambler.
posted by Fin Azvandi at 11:40 AM on April 20

"Letter From the Lost Days" from the video game Silent Hill 3
posted by cmgonzalez at 12:02 PM on April 20

When Carl Sagan experimented with marijuana to generate ideas for scientific essays, he knew that he would be skeptical about the content once he came down. From Poundstone's Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos:

The high Sagan consequently had to convince the straight Sagan that he knew what he was talking about. Feats of memory were proof of the high Sagan's mental prowess. With cannabis, Sagan could reconstruct childhood events... These recollections, recorded in the notes, could be checked and generally proved accurate.

When this logic failed, there remained intimidation. One tape berated his workaday self: "Listen closely, you sonofabitch of the morning! This stuff is real!"
posted by Mapes at 12:31 PM on April 20

After the dance in Back to the Future when Marty asks his future mom and dad not to be too angry when their future son sets the dining room carpet on fire.
posted by 8dot3 at 1:19 PM on April 20

This exact situation is a major plot point of the Star Trek: Voyager finale Endgame. You'll have to watch the episode to see if future self takes present self's advice.
posted by mohrr at 4:48 PM on April 20

er, I thought of the Drew Barrymore flick 50 First Dates (the one where she has short-term memory loss and Adam Sandler tries to woo her and winds up having to think of all sorts of ways to record each day to remind her when she wakes up the following day).
I also thought of Flowers for Algernon; not sure if that fits.
In terms of evoking the impermanence of the present, I thought of the ending of The Unbearable Lightness of Being (the film, not the book) and Awakenings... stuff like that.
posted by aielen at 5:16 PM on April 20

I seem to recall the movie
Groundhog Day had some kind
of scene like that.

Or rather, come to think of it,
he was beseeching someone
else not to forget the wonderful
day that they just had, but she
would. But he never could.
posted by Sully at 5:30 PM on April 20

The 1982 movie Night Shift has Michael Keaton giving his future self instructions via a handheld voice recorder. Not sure how far in the future he meant to retrieve them, though.
posted by acorncup at 5:33 PM on April 20

You would probably be interested (if you are interested in SF/fantasy) in the P.J. Farmer story "Sketches Among the Ruins of My Mind" and perhaps the movie PRIMER.
posted by Mr. Justice at 12:58 AM on April 21

UK actor, writer, comedian, intellectual and all-round extreme polymath Stephen Fry writes back to his 16-year-old self, who wrote to his future self saying "Everything I feel now as an adolescent is true"...
posted by almostwitty at 3:28 PM on May 2