Memory and transmission

1. Before projecting or savoring anything, we have already received everything: a language, a body of knowledge, tools, a habitable world that others built and handed down to us without our having earned it.
2. To measure one's life by its pleasures or its successes alone is to cut oneself off from this depth. For Confucius as for Burke, the community is a living inheritance, a pact between the dead, the living and those not yet born. To honor one's debts to the past, through filial piety or simple gratitude, is to acknowledge what one owes.
3. And to pass on in turn, a knowledge, a memory, a livable world, is to give one's brief life a share in a vaster time. What passes through us exceeds us: this frees us from the obsession with « optimizing » hours we thought were ours alone.

Therefore So to live time well is to know oneself a passage: to receive with gratitude, to transmit with care, and to find there a depth that neither the instant nor the project gives.

1. To orient oneself toward the past and transmission is to make one's life a link in a chain: receiving an inheritance, honoring what one owes, passing it on in turn.
2. But this link, by dint of serving the chain, ends up no longer belonging to itself. One lives under the gaze of the dead and in care for those not yet born, between a loyalty to the past and a duty to the future, without ever inhabiting the present, which truly is one's own.
3. Under the fine name of depth a weight may hide: debts one did not choose, roles one perpetuates without willing them. To define oneself by what one has received is sometimes to spare oneself the task of becoming oneself: lacking authenticity, one lives out of loyalty a life that is not one's own.

Therefore So the orientation toward memory can dispossess us of the only time that is ours: by honoring too much what comes before and after, one forgets to live the in-between, which is our life.

1. Grant that we receive everything from the past. It remains to ask what it is worth, for the life one has to live, to turn first toward what precedes and follows us.
2. For of transmission I will not see the fruit: when my legacy bears, I will no longer be there. To devote myself to it is to live for a time from which I am absent, and to entrust my worth to what will happen without me.
3. One may see in it a last ruse against death: failing to endure, one dreams of surviving in one's children, one's work, one's line. But to face one's own end, being-toward-death, is to understand that no one dies in my place, and that this time allotted to me is mine to live, not my heirs'.

Therefore So to devote oneself to transmission can soften the thought of vanishing, but at the cost of a detour: one busies oneself with the afterward so as not to have to inhabit the now, the only time still ours.