In the voluminous autobiographical novel “My Struggle,” Karl Ove Knausgaard-a middle-aged man who hopes to be better today than he was as a young man-questions whether it even makes sense to use the same name over a lifetime. On the other hand, some of us want to disconnect from our past selves burdened by who we used to be or caged by who we are, we wish for multipart lives. It turns out that you’ve changed, after all. But the time travel ceases when you step out of the gym. One reason to go to a high-school reunion is to feel like one’s past self-old friendships resume, old in-jokes resurface, old crushes reignite. But he couched the idea as an aspiration-“And I could wish my days to be / Bound each to each by natural piety”-as if to say that, though it would be nice if our childhoods and adulthoods were connected like the ends of a rainbow, the connection could be an illusion that depends on where we stand. In the poem “The Rainbow,” William Wordsworth wrote that “the Child is Father of the Man,” and this motto is often quoted as truth. You might prefer being one to the other, but find it hard to shift your perspective.

If you have the former feelings, you’re probably a continuer if the latter, you’re probably a divider. Does the self you remember feel like you, or like a stranger? Do you seem to be remembering yesterday, or reading a novel about a fictional character? Certain key events-college? war? marriage? Alcoholics Anonymous?-hadn’t yet occurred. Back then, you cared deeply about certain things (a girlfriend? Depeche Mode?) but were oblivious of others (your political commitments? your children?). Try to remember life as you lived it years ago, on a typical day in the fall. I feel this way, too, although most people who know me well say that I’ve been the same person forever. “I’ve walked through many doorways,” he’s told me.

Her brother holds the opposite view: he looks back on several distinct epochs in his life, each with its own set of attitudes, circumstances, and friends. My mother-in-law, who lives not far from her parents’ house in the same town where she grew up, insists that she is the same as she’s always been, and recalls with fresh indignation her sixth birthday, when she was promised a pony but didn’t get one. (Those boyfriends! That music! Those outfits!) But others have a strong sense of connection with their younger selves, and for them the past remains a home. Are we the same people at four that we will be at twenty-four, forty-four, or seventy-four? Or will we change substantially through time? Is the fix already in, or will our stories have surprising twists and turns? Some people feel that they’ve altered profoundly through the years, and to them the past seems like a foreign country, characterized by peculiar customs, values, and tastes.

If we could see our childish selves more clearly, we might have a better sense of the course and the character of our lives. My son, who is happy and voluble, is so much fun to be around that I sometimes mourn, on his behalf, his future inability to remember himself. I have no memories of my own feelings, thoughts, or personality I’m told that I was a cheerful, talkative child given to long dinner-table speeches, but don’t remember being so. They also fail to illuminate any inner reality. These disconnected images don’t knit together into a picture of a life.

But how much of our joyous life will he remember? What I recall from when I was four are the red-painted nails of a mean babysitter the brushed-silver stereo in my parents’ apartment a particular orange-carpeted hallway some houseplants in the sun and a glimpse of my father’s face, perhaps smuggled into memory from a photograph. My son and I have great times together lately, we’ve been building Lego versions of familiar places (the coffee shop, the bathroom) and perfecting the “flipperoo,” a move in which I hold his hands while he somersaults backward from my shoulders to the ground. I have few memories of being four-a fact I find disconcerting now that I’m the father of a four-year-old.

Poems about growing up with bad parents