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.

I have lived a thousand years questions