Surely Someday

“Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit,” Aeneas says to the surviving Trojans as they take shelter in an inlet on the coast of Libya, far away from their home sacked by the Greeks, their fleet wrecked by a divine storm.

“Perhaps one day it will help us to remember this too.”

Maybe embarrassingly for a classics joint concentrator, there aren’t many lines in the “Aeneid” that I can recite by memory, but this one is engraved in my mind.

Aeneas and his men are suffering through no fault of their own, casualties of a war provoked by the gods’ arrogance and Paris’ desire. They’re suffering from a past that they failed to prevent, yet one they couldn’t have avoided. Aeneas’ solution is to move forward despite the overwhelming pain, to use the experience to create a better future. It makes sense; really, what else could he do? Ruminating about regret, refusing to allow ourselves to move on, only leads to a desperate wish for time to stop and an endless, spiraling present.

In his “resume of failures and setbacks,” Dean Khurana normalizes failure, writing, “Your failures are not you. Failures and setbacks are part of taking risks and living.” Failures are often our fault, but they aren’t part of us, nor unique to us; in the course of life, Trojan heroes experienced setbacks, and so do we. When I embarrassed myself on stream in a “Super Smash Bros.” tournament, that wasn’t me. When in my Harvard interview I accidentally made an ableist comment, that wasn’t me. When I left my final visit with my best friend, our Braille Monopoly game half-finished, not knowing that I’d never see him again — even then, that wasn’t me.

In case it sounds like denial, I mean it literally: It wasn’t me. The past is gone, and my past self too. That was me back then, and still my fault, but not the me I am now — and the present is all that exists. We change, and we grow; such is the spirit of the growth-based mindset that we’re repeatedly taught here. The problem is that we often don’t follow it, not because we don’t want to, but because we can’t manage it. This culture of normalizing failure is absolutely necessary, but in its one-size-fits-all application to everything from disappointing exam scores to car accidents, it trivializes how difficult coping with regret can truly be.

“Just move on! A failure is only a chance to grow, that’s all. It doesn’t define you. Just move on!”

If only it were so simple to prevent the pain of failure from taking over and locking us in a cycle of regret. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit; yet even Aeneas cries in grief at the destruction of his home. Wanting to move on, even choosing to move on, is separate from being able to do so — a distinction that we too often simplify in a well-meaning attempt to show that self-recovery from mistakes and setbacks is possible. In fact, this mindset paradoxically treats one’s inability to move on after failure as a failure in itself, as a mark of weakness, when instead we need to acknowledge that such self-acceptance may take conscious effort spanning days or even years. And that’s okay.

The growth-based model of failure breaks down further when our mistakes and failures have harmed others, a situation where a promise of future improvement falls flat in a hopeless present. When an outcome is in the past, and we wish we could turn back the clock and make amends, but it’s probably too late; when a decision we ourselves made led to an outcome that hurt others, whether a close friend or a stranger — how do we live with that? The Trojans suffered from circumstances outside their control, but what if Troy’s destruction had been their fault? Could their actions — and likewise, our own harmful mistakes — be forgiven? If not, how can we even want to forgive ourselves when it means moving on from the comfortable safety of pain and frozen time towards the doubt and fear that come with embracing the past and self-acceptance?

I really want to know.

The fact that my failures aren’t part of me, that I’ve since learned and grown, means nothing when a friend has suffered by my fault. The pain feels crushing, just as much now as it originally was. And it makes me wonder: What if? What if I’d recognized and understood my behavior a little earlier? What if I had just one more chance? What if I were a better person who deserved what I had?

I did enough, right? I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t trying to make up for it, right? But then, where did I go wrong? What am I doing here?

What I’m doing here, I guess, is living.

We’re human. We fail people and we wrong them, because we didn’t understand, because we couldn’t do better. That our intent to help and the effort we commit don’t always matter is a painful truth, but accepting it shows respect for the people we hurt and lets us keep learning, keep moving on, so that maybe one day we’ll finally figure out how to truly be the person we need to be once the time comes again.

We feel guilt for a reason, after all: it serves the evolutionary purpose of repairing and strengthening cooperation by promoting trustworthy apologies and forgiveness. It improves us as people. So although we frame failures and mistakes as facts of life to accept, glance at, and then disregard, they’re more than routine annoyances. Ignoring our regret and our desire to do everything over again isn’t strength or growth — it’s the only true failure. By balancing the idea that our mistakes don’t define us with the commitment to hold our regret close, we can accept failure as an opportunity for genuine growth while also forgiving ourselves. The process will take a different form for everyone, but one day, our guilt-ridden hopes for the past can become our imagination for the future, and frozen time can flow again.

I think Virgil understood that concept. Aeneas’ line can be translated in another way: “Perhaps one day it will please us to remember this too.” I don’t know if it will ever make me happy to remember how far I’ve moved on from these depths I’ve sunk to; I don’t even know whether I’ll be able to forgive myself anytime soon.

But I do know that I’ll do my best to make the future what I wish the past had been, and maybe one day, surely someday, I’ll smile. A smile that says, “I’ve made mistakes, I’ve failed, and memories overwhelm me; but even if it’s too late to take everything back, I’ll carry these experiences with me, and I’ll grow.”

Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

Ben T. Elwy ’23 lives in Quincy House. Their column, “The Smiles We Choose,” appears on alternating Thursdays.