Chris Carosa

Forbidden Planet movie poster, Copyrighted by Loew’s International. Artists(s) not known., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Down below stretched the New York Central’s vast sun-bathed Seneca Yard. As far as my four-year-old eyes could see, the many trains slow-danced with smooth precision. Colors. Shapes. Mesmerizing! “When I grow up, I want to be like the man who owned all these trains,” I told my mother. “Why?” she asked. Without hesitation, I said, “Because he must be rich!”

Yet, hours later, I sat with my father and watched our small black-and-white TV. News of the latest NASA manned rocket launch captivated me. I moved closer to take in all the details. Countdown. Fiery thrust. Liftoff! I spun around and said, “Dad, when I grow up, I want to be an astronaut.” “Why?” “Because it must be fun!”

Would you rather preserve the past or forge the future? Or is that the wrong question? Yesterday’s lessons and tomorrow’s dreams don’t collide in the present—they converge.

Longtime readers know my split soul: classic fallen-flag railroads and space exploration. Born fifty years too late—or fifty years too early. Yet, here I am, existing in the limbo between rails and rockets—and I wouldn’t trade it.

Consider how differently they move—and how each shapes how we think. Trains vs. rockets. Rails vs. launch windows. Memory vs. momentum.

Trains offer little flexibility—you’re confined to the fixed rails they run on. You know the route, trust the schedule, and sleep easy. There are no surprises. For example, New York Central’s premier passenger train, the 20th Century Limited (1902–1967), was famously on time—often to the minute.

That precision breeds confidence. Sure, there might be delays, but the interconnectedness of things makes it less likely that the entire system will collapse. Short of a catastrophe. And even then, the rails remain.

Flipping the script, space travel is literally limitless—the whole “to infinity and beyond.” You can reach into the unknown and “boldly go where no man has gone before.” It’s thrilling. It’s liberating. It’s also a little dangerous. You never know what alien landscapes might reveal.

But aliens may be the least of your worries. It’s a Twilight Zone–like twist: the real danger isn’t aliens. It’s you. The temptation to wander takes you off the beaten track (pun intended). It can also take your mind off the ball. Mission drift. Failure mode. One detour and you’re lost in the void.

You don’t have to be a Dr. Dolittle to see how this pushmi-pullyu dynamic works. Preserve the past? Or forge the future? It’s a constant tug-of-war. It’s enough to drive you crazy.

How does this false choice play out in the real world? In Hollywood-speak, should we opt for the sure thing of endless sequels until the characters become monotonous, or should we instead risk creating a brand-new story?

But wait—that’s still binary thinking. Instead of either/or, it’s more of a yin/yang engine. The past is the fuel. The future is the fire. Together, they launch you forward.

Exit Hollywood. Enter Elizabethan theater. Shakespeare’s The Tempest debuted in 1611. The first scene of Act 2 features Antonio uttering the phrase, “What’s past is prologue.” His meaning is quite deceptive. He seeks to convince Sebastian to commit murder because the Fates—history—have set the stage for just such an act.

Ironically, the original meaning of the phrase “What’s past is prologue” has not been preserved. It has morphed into a more literal interpretation. Whereas its original use called upon the classical gods of fate, today it simply refers to how our historical past can reveal our future. Think Napoleon’s winter in Russia—and Hitler’s, a century later.

Philosopher George Santayana famously summed this up when he warned, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Not quite as pithy as Shakespeare, but just as memorable. And it has more bite than “if you are mindful of the past, you will plan better for the future.” That’s what the Greek rhetorician Isocrates advised Cyprian Prince Nicocles in the 4^th century BC. It’s not fate. It’s pattern recognition.

It’s not just empires. It’s your life, too. “History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” This oft-repeated quote, attributed (probably wrongly) to Mark Twain¹, embodies this key idea: the past gives us echoes, if not exact replicas. We can learn from the spirit of the past without being bound by its letter.

When “the past is prologue,” then “the future is now.” This latter phrase implies the future is happening right before our very eyes. We might not recognize it until sometime later. As with rocket ships, the future launches to sites unknown. Unburdened by the unmoving iron path of the rail, the future wanders from the straight line into a world—or pattern of thought—no one ever expects (like the Spanish Inquisition).

Just like the future, the “Spanish Inquisition” non sequitur came out of nowhere. To some extent, the same could be said of the entire Mark Twain footnote.

The future is all about these unexpected turns—the rabbit holes that make discovery possible. You can’t schedule serendipity. You can’t plot creativity on rails. But you can learn to recognize when you’ve stumbled onto something valuable—and that recognition comes from pattern, from memory, from the past.

It’s not a choice between preserving the past and forging the future. These are not distinct world lines—separate timelines that never touch, like mainline tracks that run parallel forever. Rather, they represent an interconnected mosaic that converges in the present. We look to the rails of the past to jump into the future. It’s like taking a hit radio series and adapting it for TV (like The Lone Ranger—a 1933 radio hit reborn as a 1949 television series). Same story. New medium.

Or like using Elizabethan prose (say, The Tempest) as the launching pad of a classic sci-fi spectacle (Forbidden Planet).

The old becomes fuel for the new. It’s the ultimate in recycling.

What does this mean for you?

Study the rails. Pack the rocket.

That four-year-old on the bridge understood something profound: the trains below weren’t relics—they were launching pads. The astronaut dreams didn’t replace the railroad dreams. They were fueled by them.

The past isn’t prologue.

It’s propellant.

¹ Here’s what Twain really said: “History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.”

Well, either Twain or his coauthor Charles Dudley Warner said that in The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day, the 1874 novel that they co-wrote. Some years later, Twain wrote, “no occurrence is sole and solitary, but is merely a repetition of a thing which has happened before, and perhaps often.”

If you’re interested, the closest approximation of the “rhyme” quote comes from a 1965 essay by psychologist Theodor Reik, who wrote: “It has been said that history repeats itself. This is perhaps not quite correct; it merely rhymes.” This is the likely original source of the “rhyme” quote, as it wasn’t until the January 25, 1970, edition of the New York Times that the quote was first attributed to Twain. Did the Times try to preserve the past that wasn’t?