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| Roger Sessions (seated right) in 1959, with Douglas Moore (seated left) and (standing left to right) Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Wallingford Riegger, William Schuman, Walter Piston |
That's what history is: the story of everything that needn't have been like that.
CLIVE JAMES, Cultural Amnesia.
If Grandma had a dick, she would have been Grandpa.
A sober response to metaphysical speculations about counterfactuals and possible worlds.
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This is as sentimental as Clive James ever allowed himself to feel on the printed page: A memorable turn of phrase infused with longing for a world where human decisions and subsequent actions - which is what history is ultimately about - are not subject to the tyranny of causal determinism. Alas, so far causal determinism is the only coherent perspective on how the world works, and it tells us that everything happens exactly as it has to, if often not as we wish it had. The latter may give rise to feelings of regret, but to elevate such feelings to the status of 'ontological detectors' of how things might have been is sentimental daydreaming at best.
