Lewis Carroll quote

 

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: "It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then." - Lewis Carroll, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Hard to comment or improve on that.

It is one of those lines that sounds whimsical in context and then turns out to be surprisingly profound.

The quotation comes from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where Alice is navigating a world in which identity, size, memory, and logic keep shifting. But outside the story, it captures a real observation: we are not static creatures.

Sometimes the changes are obvious—new knowledge, new experiences, grief, illness, love, age. Sometimes they are so gradual that we only notice them when we look back and discover that the person who held a certain opinion, fear, ambition, or certainty feels almost like a stranger.

The line also contains a quiet warning. We often judge our past selves by what we know now. But the person who made those decisions did not have today's information, today's perspective, or today's maturity. Yesterday's self was working with yesterday's understanding.

At eighty-three, I suspect that idea may resonate differently than it does for a twenty-year-old. Not because the self disappears, but because one accumulates a long succession of selves. There is continuity—the same thread running through the years—but the person at one end of the thread and the person at the other are not quite identical.

Carroll's sentence is only fourteen words long, yet it touches on memory, personal identity, forgiveness, growth, and the passage of time. That's a remarkable amount of work for a single line.

We constantly change in two ways. First the trivial, physical way, the molecules and cells and tissues constantly dying and being replaced. Second, the candle flickers and burns down.

Yes. And the two kinds of change are related, but not the same.

The first is the biological turnover. Much of the body is in flux. Cells die, proteins are broken down and rebuilt, atoms come and go. The matter composing you today is not exactly the matter that composed you years ago. If identity depended on possessing the same molecules, none of us would survive very long.

The second change is deeper. The candle image is a good one. A flame persists even though the gases and energy passing through it are constantly changing. It has continuity without permanence. Human lives seem rather like that. We retain a recognizable pattern—a character, a memory, a history—yet that pattern is continuously modified by experience and age. The flame is not merely replacing fuel; it is also shortening the candle.

That second kind of change has a direction. Time does not merely substitute one state for another. It accumulates consequences. Every conversation remembered, every skill learned, every loss endured, every forgiveness granted becomes part of the person who exists afterward. The eighty-three-year-old is not just a refreshed version of the child; he is the result of all the intervening years.

This is one reason the ancient puzzle of identity is so difficult. If everything material changes and the personality changes too, what exactly remains the same? Different traditions answer differently. Some posit an enduring self. Others, including much of Buddhism, argue that what we call a self is more like the flame—a continuing process rather than a permanent thing.

Your candle image captures something that the cellular-replacement analogy misses. The body's molecules may be renewed, but the candle is still burning down. We are not simply being rebuilt; we are also being transformed by the passage of time.

I think many philosophers would agree with you, provided "exists" is understood in that way.

The mistake may be to assume that existence requires a thing to be static. A whirlpool exists, yet it is not a fixed object. Water enters and leaves continuously, but the pattern persists. A flame exists, though none of the gases remain in place. A symphony exists while it is being played, even though each note vanishes as soon as it sounds.

The "me" may be more like that: not a substance but an organized process.

What people often object to is the idea of a separate little observer inside the head—the homunculus. If there were such a creature, one could then ask who is observing inside its head, and so on forever. But rejecting the homunculus does not require rejecting the self.

In ordinary life, there is plainly a distinction between you and me. There is a continuing center of memory, intention, habit, responsibility, and experience that deserves the word "self." The difficult question is not whether it exists, but what kind of thing it is.

Your image of the candle is useful because it avoids two extremes. The flame is not a permanent object, but neither is it an illusion. It is real, identifiable, and continuous. If I point to a candle and say "that flame," I am referring to something genuine even though every molecule involved is changing from moment to moment.

That strikes me as close to how many people actually experience themselves. The child, the young man, and the old man are not identical. Yet they are not unrelated strangers either. There is a continuity of process, a history carried forward. The self is not a thing that stays unchanged; it is the ongoing pattern of change itself.

In a way, Carroll's quotation and your observation fit together nicely. "I was a different person then" does not mean there was no "I" yesterday. It means the flame has burned for another day. The process continues, but it is not quite the same process it was before.

The comment lament, "if only I could go back knowing what I know now."

That lament contains a hidden contradiction.

The person who "knows what I know now" is the product of everything that happened in between. If you could truly go back knowing what you know now, you would no longer be the person who originally stood at that crossroads. The wisdom, caution, patience, or humility you gained may have come precisely from the mistakes you wish to undo.

Of course, we do not usually mean it literally. We mean, "I wish I could spare myself the consequences of that error." That's a very human feeling.

But there is something interesting about regret. We often imagine a version of the past where we made the better choice and then became exactly who we are today. Yet many of the qualities we value in ourselves were forged by the very experiences we would erase. The failed investment may have taught prudence. The betrayal may have taught discernment. The illness may have taught compassion. The embarrassment may have taught humility.

A younger self of yours might have listened politely to some piece of wisdom you possess now and then ignored it completely. The knowledge was not merely information waiting to be downloaded. It had to be earned through living.

That does not mean every mistake was necessary or beneficial. Some are simply mistakes. But it does suggest that the phrase "knowing what I know now" smuggles an entire lifetime of experience into a moment where that experience did not yet exist.

The old saying that youth is wasted on the young points in the same direction. The young have the energy, and the old have the perspective. Nature, or fate, or the universe, rarely arranges for one person to possess both at the same time.

And perhaps that is why we tell stories about time travel. They express a wish not merely to revisit the past, but to reconcile two different selves: the one who acted and the one who understands.

I tend to react to that with a bit more skepticism. You would avoid the mistakes you made but would make others.

That's a very sensible objection.

The usual time-travel fantasy assumes that your present wisdom would let you navigate the past flawlessly. But why should it? You would be solving one set of problems and creating another.

Suppose you avoided a bad investment. Fine. Now you have money you otherwise would not have had. That changes where you live, whom you meet, what opportunities you pursue, and what risks you take. Perhaps you then make a different mistake that was impossible in the original timeline.

More generally, knowledge is always incomplete. Even if you knew the consequences of one decision, you would still be ignorant of countless others. Life is not a multiple-choice test where you finally get the answer key. It is more like exploring a landscape in fog. Removing one patch of fog does not clear the whole landscape.

There is also the problem that what appears to be a mistake from one vantage point may not look like a mistake from another. If a particular error led indirectly to a friendship, a career, a marriage, a move to another country, or some other valued outcome, the accounting becomes very complicated.

So I think your skepticism gets at something important: regret often imagines a world in which errors can be eliminated. In reality, human beings seem to be error-producing creatures. We exchange one set of mistakes for another. Wisdom may improve the average quality of our decisions, but it does not grant immunity from unforeseen consequences.

In that sense, "If only I could go back knowing what I know now" may be less a practical proposal than an expression of frustration. What we really mean is, "I wish I could have avoided that particular mistake." But life does not offer a mistake-free version. It only offers different mistakes.

The candle still flickers. It just flickers in a slightly different direction.