Mme Harker has a niece of primary school age. This otherwise blameless child has recently disturbed her family by claiming that the past can’t be the past if it’s the future. Apparently she has been skewered on what grammarians and philosophers might call the semantic/chronological fault line.

Liane and all her little classmates were asked by their French teacher (the teacher is Belgian, French is the subject, but I’m going to write about it in English ... is that clear?) to put the following sentences into their “chronological order”:

She is tidying her room
She tidied her room
She is about to tidy her room
She has just tidied her room
She will tidy her room

Liane dutifully performed the exercise thus:

She will tidy her room
She is about to tidy her room
She is tidying her room
She has just tidied her room
She tidied her room

Imagine the girl’s horror upon receiving the worst possible mark. She was not alone. Several others went the same way. So, in order to be clear, Mme X presented the following sequence along a timeline. For language teachers, this is the correct answer:

She tidied her room
She has just tidied her room
She is tidying her room
She is about to tidy her room
She will tidy her room

Mme X’s argument was that the first statement is in the past (on the left of the historical chart) while the last statement is in the future and thus on the right. Liane understandably threw a bit of a tantrum when she got home. “How”, she asked, “Could I be about to tidy my room, if only a couple of seconds ago I was actually tidying it?”

Her parents who, unlike many, tend to support teacher, were confused as to what they should think or say. So Mme Harker brought the thorny question to me, believing naively that I must be some kind of expert. Little does she realize how much I rely on the pedantry of my editors.

I am definitely on Liane’s side here. Teacher asked for a “chronological” order. She got one, albeit a narrative chronology. What she actually wanted as a teacher of French, was a “grammatical” order. Indeed, if each of the examples given had referred to different persons and situations, I might even have agreed with her chronology. But what she in truth offered the class as a problem to solve were a series of phrases that would serve as the deconstructed bones of a story.

She will tidy her room. Our tale begins with a child who realizes that while the world is searching for MH370, she may as well do her bit and tidy her room, who knows, she may discover a piece of tail fin. She is about to tidy her room. Initially she stands in the doorway puzzling just how to commence: toys first, clothes first, large items first, small items (easily trampled) or rubbish and dirty laundry? She is tidying her room. Having decided, she is seen in the densest part of the action, courageously battling the demons of chaos. She has just tidied her room. Emerging from this unequal struggle she may be seen sitting with a satisfied air in the midst of what appears like a photo spread in Good Housekeeping. She tidied her room. Time passes and our heroine looks back wistfully on her triumph, already ruing the day when she must start all over again.

Mme X should not have asked for a “chronological” order, but rather a “semantic” one.  In such a philosophically ideal and rarefied space, the past (with all its tenses) is strictly, irredeemably past, while the future (with its conditions and projections) is the inevitable outcome of unending causality. Oh, that life could be so simple! We, who live in the real world, know that the “future” is the golden land that cradled all our great and good intentions at the start of our narrative, whereas the “past” is what we are going to end up having to live with ... sometime in the future.


© Edwin Drood, May 2014



Illustration: Prologue pigs by © David John