Time & Perspective Quote by Henri Bergson

Bergson is quietly detonating the comforting idea that memory is a kind of personal filing cabinet we can tidy up or lose. If the past is "preserved by itself automatically", then forgetting isn’t the past disappearing; it’s us failing to access what’s already there. The line has the cool confidence of a metaphysical corrective: your life is not a series of moments that evaporate as soon as they’re lived. It accumulates, whether you curate it or not.

The intent here is anti-mechanistic. Bergson spent his career resisting the era’s growing faith that consciousness could be explained like a machine - stimulus, response, data storage. He proposes something stranger: duration, a lived time that thickens. The past doesn’t sit behind us like a closed book; it presses into the present, shaping perception and action. That’s why "automatically" matters: it strips the ego of control. You don’t preserve your past through effort or narrative discipline; existence does it for you.

The subtext is almost unnerving. If everything is conserved, then the self is haunted by its own completeness. What we call "moving on" becomes less a deletion than a reorganization. Trauma, habit, instinct - these aren’t glitches in the system but evidence that the system never lets go.

Contextually, Bergson is writing against both positivism and a flattening, clock-driven modernity. Industrial time chops life into units; Bergson insists time is a continuum, and the past is not dead storage but active pressure. In that frame, the present is not freedom from history - it’s history arriving on schedule.