We've been haunted by Dickens's A Christmas Carol—appropriately, I suppose! It was a key story from my "real life" childhood, anyway. I'm not sure my older sibling ever read the book; their cynicism about Christmas was much more complete than mine (at least, that's the overall impression I picked up). Our RL parents had zero use for Christmas and their children learned to mimic and amplify their sour attitudes about an American holiday that, even in the 1980s, already felt like it was devouring the entire end of the year.
But I read A Christmas Carol. Why was there even a copy of the book in the apartment? I now wonder. It didn't seem like the sort of book that either of our parents would want to buy but it was available to me and I read it and secretly cherished it. Some part of our old self wanted to believe in miracles still, and yearned for Christmas cheer with a loving family, instead of...what Frisk and I actually experienced. I even hoped that maybe three ghosts could appear to our RL father, and soften his heart—not that he was a Scrooge exactly, but he was not a warm and affectionate person, and he spent as much time as he could away from home and at work; it was too easy to match RL dad up in my childish mind with the story's villain.
I've been revisiting the story; it's actually been some decades since I read it, though we've occasionally visited some adaptations, notably the superlative Alastair Sim version, the problematical film Scrooged, and the Campbell Playhouse / Orson Welles radio adaptation starring Lionel Barrymore. I am struck, upon re-reading A Christmas Carol, with how much depends upon Scrooge's reaction to the visions of Christmas Past. The Alastair Sim adaptation is especially mindful of the importance of Christmas Past, and sees fit to write some new material—filling in some gaps, in which we get details about how and why Sim's Scrooge felt compelled to seek business success ("the even-handed dealing of the world") and how he became the cutthroat entrepreneur whom we meet at the start of the book. it's powerful stuff: Scrooge sees these reminders of how much brighter and kinder his world and his desires used to be, and he's stricken with remorse and guilt.
...Suppose he wasn't?
I'm in Scrooge's position, roughly; for reasons still murky to me (wanting to recover lost knowledge is part of it) I willed that I should remember as much of my past as possible, which means that I'm bombarded with painful memories and reminders of old sins and failures. I have always sensed, however, that there was another option: I could simply kick my own past into the garbage can. It's very easy to imagine a Scrooge, especially a cynical postmodern Scrooge, who gets shown all the same visions of Christmas Past and who simply laughs at them. One must choose to learn from the past. I didn't need to feel this sense of duty towards the past; I could do what so many others have done, and cut the past completely away. Evangelical Christians have their version of this; it's like they've divided their lives into two halves, Lost and Saved, and whatever they did when they were Lost no longer matters now that they're Saved. An evangelical Scrooge might well be immune to the methods of A Christmas Carol; they'd not feel inclined to assign their old memories that much weight.
And of course, once you've decided that your own past is fungible, you're now free to substitute another. One gets a taste of this from right-wing sentimentalism, their fixation on gauzy mythologized stories of a glorious and wonderful past. Such a synthetic Past blurs into a golden Future, because now you have a mission: make those shining memories of the past come back to life! the worse the Present gets, the grander the mission.
What I've just described is roughly equivalent to a magical working on oneself. By editing your own past, you can give yourself a sense of purpose and motivation that others don't have. You could even edit your past into something truly absurd—one thinks perhaps of L. Ron Hubbard's claims about the distant past—and that just makes the challenge of bringing your ludicrous visions to life all the more satisfying. Heck I wouldn't be surprised if, some day, there exists in a future where massive geoengineering is possible, a gang of flat-Earthers with a grand mission to make the Earth literally flat, matching physical reality to their models of how the Earth should be—of how the Earth in fact was in the past, before modernity corrupted the very shape of Earth itself.
Heck you can do that in Minecraft, right? I never got into Minecraft.
~Chara
