Bob Schwartz

I’ve been looking through boxes of old photos. Not just from our lifetime, but back to the days when our grandparents were younger, and their parents and families too.

I shared a photo with a friend I’ve known a long time. He appreciated it and wished me luck with the photo “rabbit hole”.

He’s right. It is easy to get lost in these images from the past.

One view of the philosophy of time comes from various Buddhist perspectives. From the eighth century Zen text, Xin Xin Ming/Trust in Mind:

Words!
The Way is beyond language
for in it there is
no yesterday
no tomorrow
no today

There is no yesterday, tomorrow, today. There is apparently yesterday, tomorrow, today. Are we attached to any of them? Are we liberated from any of them?

The TV series Mad Men is about a charming and successful man, advertising executive Don Draper, who is lost in time. He has adopted the identity of a dead man, buries his true past, is in the business of fooling people, including himself.

The final episode of the first season is called “The Wheel”. The client is Kodak, who has asked the firm to advertise their new slide projector, then called the Wheel, but ultimately becomes known, in the story and in the real world, as the Carousel.

The episode is considered one the greatest in TV history. The following scene is the penultimate moment.

Don comes up with a client pitch that involves slides from his own early family life, and a story that is clearly made up about his first boss in advertising. Do the photos represent the actual past, or just some elements of a more whole and complex past? Which is an illusion? Is there yesterday? Is there tomorrow?