Happy Wednesday, you cheeky peaches.
What did you want to be when you grew up? What did you want to be when you grew up. What a confusing sentence.
When you grew up. On its own, that’s just a past tense – ‘when you grew up’, as seen in sentences like, ‘when you grew up, you became much less of a pain in the rear hole’, or ‘when you grew up, it quickly became clear that you were not a micropig, but in fact just a regular pig.’
But in this sentence, ‘what did you want to be when you grew up’, it’s not a straightforward past tense. It’s more like a future past tense. Future past. What the earth does that mean? That’d like saying ‘head north-south up the Empire State Building on a bearing of 439 degrees Wednesday’. It’s nonsense.
Or is it? The future past. Sometimes, we’re talking about things that happened in the past, but that past looks forward to a future. Its future. Something like: “Uncle Jesmond was going to grease his bowling ball before the big match”. We’re describing a scene from Uncle Jesmond’s past (we are not Live with Uncle Jesmond, though that is a TV show I’d watch), and in that scene, there is a bowling match in his future. A future in the past.
There are a few different ways of expressing the future in the past, and they’re useful for different things. “She was about to tell him that there actually aren’t any wild apes in the Czech Republic”, This future past implies that the future in question is going to happen pretty soon, and implies an interruption which would lead to the proposed future not being fulfilled. This sentence craves a ‘when suddenly’: “She was about to tell him that there actually aren’t any wild apes in the Czech Republic, when suddenly, a gibbon tackled her from behind”. See what I mean.
How about this one: “I knew you would try and learn to do a backflip, even though you have none of the natural attributes to achieve that”. Me, back then, I knew you would, so me, back then, if you quoted my thoughts from that moment, they would have gone something like, “he’s going to try and learn to do a backflip, even though he has none of the natural attributes to achieve that”. He’s going to. A future tense. So this is a reported future-focused thought, thought in the past.
Are you with me?
The future past, or the future in the past (I’m not sure if they’re different things), it seems to me quite a wistful tense. Love the word wistful. Wistful means pensive, reflective, full of perspective. The future past has the feel of looking at something from above, considering the start of a story once you know what happens at the end. If you ask yourself, what did you want to be when you grew up, you’re looking down from above at a past version of yourself, one who didn’t know what you now know. The ignorant you, who didn’t yet know what you would become. Would become, there we go, another future past.
There’s a certain wisdom to the future past, though also perhaps a certain sadness. It’s quite a nice sadness, but the sadness is certainly there. The sadness is one of life’s most wonderful, sweetest and most soul-swelling sadnesses: the sadness of the irretrievability of the past.
When we use the future past tense, it’s generally not important exactly when the past’s future is. Relative to us, it means pretty much nothing. It could be our past, it could be our future, it could, coincidentally, be exactly right now. All that matters is that relative to that past time that we’re talking about, it was the future. So, when we use the future past, for just a moment we change the focal point of our perception of time. Normally, we treat the present moment with such gravity, such respect – it is the ‘NOW’, nothing else can be now, each fleeting second lies in the future, awaiting its glorious moment in the sunshine of ‘now’ before passing on, and being forever condemned to the vast irretrievable wasteland of ‘the past’. Picture all those little seconds, queueing up in an infinitely long line to stand for a blink-of-an-eye on the podium of ‘now’, the podium of ‘being’ after an eternity of ‘becoming’.
The ‘now’ is such a bigshot. All expressions of time implicitly revolve around ‘now’ – later, recently, soon, in a month, two years ago – it’s all ‘now’. But the future past shows us what time looks like when you’re standing on a different part of the field. It gives you a new perspective. It is wistful.
I’m not sure I’ve grown up yet. Why would I want to be fully grown? No more growing? No more, ever? What a bore.
Leave a Reply