Time & Perspective Quote by Jessamyn West

West’s line lands like a quiet provocation: we treat “the past” as hard evidence and “the future” as speculation, but psychologically they’re built with the same unreliable tools. Memory isn’t a filing cabinet; it’s a writing room. Every retelling edits the draft, rearranging motive, smoothing contradictions, and quietly casting ourselves in a role we can live with. By saying the past is “almost as much” imagination as the future, West avoids the cheap thrill of total relativism. She’s not claiming nothing happened. She’s pointing at how what happened becomes story, and story becomes identity.

The intent feels less philosophical flex than moral warning. If you believe your past is a fixed record, you can weaponize it: grievances become destiny, nostalgia becomes policy, trauma becomes a single, authoritative narrative that blocks change. West’s subtext is that the past is always being recruited to justify the present. We don’t recall; we curate.

Context matters. West wrote in a century defined by mass persuasion, world wars, and the mid-century boom in psychology and self-narration. Public life was awash in competing “versions” of history, while private life increasingly framed experience through memory, therapy, and confession. Her phrasing captures that cultural pivot: the future is openly imagined, but the past is imagined with a straight face. The sentence works because it flips the prestige hierarchy. It demotes certainty, elevates interpretation, and reminds us that what we call “history” begins, often, as a draft in the mind.