What we think of as the present is really just the leading edge of the past, pushing us relentlessly toward a future that never really arrives. So if you’re looking for an extra dash of depression in your life, you can adopt my belief that all we have is the past.

But that’s not so bad — the past contains anything that ever happened and everyone who ever lived, including all your friends and that great lunch you had at that place that time. So it can’t be boring. But there are rules about what we can do with the past. Despite all the time-travel movies, we can’t actually go there or live there, we can only look — back.

And we can’t not look. Those who can’t look back are amnesiacs. Those who won’t look back are fools.

Passenger-side rear-view mirrors warn us that objects are closer than they appear. The backward glance is dangerous but also necessary. Looking in the mirror too long will crash us into something sooner or later, so for everyday life we need the backward glance more than the longer backward gaze. But now and then, hopefully not behind the wheel, we need to take a bit more time looking at the past, trying to figure out what we need from it, what it did for us and to us, and how we can use it to improve our lives.

I should define the terms I’ve arbitrarily created for this site. The Backward is all of the past, and all the ways we relate to the past. The Near Backward is the part that has us in it — it’s in our personal memory bank. I have my own Near Backward and so do you. But they overlap (even in our fragmented times I hope we have some things in common). But stretching out for thousands of years beyond that is the Far Backward. It’s harder to see the connections, the way that lost Backward world has created our world. But the connections are there.

If I go on beyond the Far Backward and hit dinosaurs, that’s the Too Far Backward. As much as I love dinosaurs, maybe I’ll try to avoid that.

Yes, I could use the prosaic word “history” instead of The Backward. But after a quarter-century of teaching classes with the word history in the title, I feel the need to shake things up and maybe find some new perspectives on how our world got this way. I don’t have answers yet. This site is me feeling my way toward some new questions. You’re welcome to join me.