Column | The past of the face

There are two old people with their son on the terrace. I mainly have a view of the old man, who has a nice head, I think. Such a head that you think: this man could be a friend of mine. But if he was a friend of mine, I would have known him younger, then I now saw his old head how he used to be. No matter how I look, I can’t see a younger face dusk by what I see. Moments later I also have a view of his wife – incredible how much she is ‘an old woman’, as if she originated like that, as if that smile of her never shed a younger face.

On the science pages of de Volkskrant I read an article by George van Hall about the possibility of time travel, physicists assume that this may be possible for quantum particles. This concerns ‘entangled quantum particles’, that more than enigmatic phenomenon, where a measurement on one particle changes something at the same time on the other particle, no matter how far from each other they are removed. Because the information would travel faster than the light, which is not possible, some physicists assume that ‘distance’ works in the quantum world ‘differently’. Then question marks. Others propose an equally bizarre solution: that the information does not travel through the space but through time, in the past to be precise, so that the particle on Mars has been in the state in which it has now been ‘brought’.

The language here falls short in every possible way. The quantum world is at least as wonderful as the Wonderland in which Alice ended up.

Well, anyway, time travel for people is not at all. We have to make do with memories, photos, buildings, documents, traces in the landscape and in the earth. And everyone knows that we are making constructions of it, some very plausible, others in violation of facts that we, for the sake of convenience, just leave out of consideration, but anyway: constructions.

What would I hear if the son on the terrace wanted to tell me something about his father? He would call a man in relation to himself, an educator, a presence, a father. The old woman would paint another picture. It would not help anything, not even to view photos, the younger face would remain theoretically, I could never fill it with my own perception.

Is that really what you do with your own friends? I am not always projecting their younger ones through their current faces, in fact, sometimes when you see a photo of their younger form, you think: really? Like this? Then you have to force your memory to say to yourself: yes indeed, he looked like.

So it’s not about the precise visual memory. It is about the feeling of past that always participates in the present, often without being aware of it. It’s there. Sometimes you pick up the past together to reinforce the feeling that you know each other, to the warmth that rises from that commonality and that spreads over the present.

Can it be too late for friendship, if someone is old and nothing or little can be picked up? No, I don’t believe that. But it is a different friendship, there is, as it were, more dry matter, information that you have only received and did not form from living material. Or is that a theoretical difference? People know so much and understand so little, not just about quantum physics.

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