9. Persistence and Recurrence
Some convictions disappear almost without leaving a trace.
A childhood fear may become difficult even to remember.
An old ambition can lose all force.
Judgments about someone simply cease to matter.
Other convictions remain for decades.
And still others disappear, then return.
These are different patterns.
A persistent conviction continues to participate in orientation even if it is rarely explicit.
Someone may spend years without thinking about the importance of friendship, yet organize major decisions around it whenever the issue arises.
A conviction can leave attention without disappearing.
Disappearance is stronger.
The conviction then no longer participates in orientation.
A person may remember having believed something without being able to recover its former force.
"I know I once thought that, but I can't understand anymore why it seemed obvious."
Recurrence occurs when something that had ceased to operate becomes convincing again.
Old political convictions can return when circumstances change. Religious convictions sometimes disappear and later re-emerge. A judgment about another person may become convincing again after a new event.
Distinguishing persistence from recurrence is not always easy, especially from the outside.
If a conviction returns after twenty years, was it absent or merely dormant?
That may depend on what we mean by participating in orientation, and the evidence can be thin.
Still, the distinction is useful.
The conditions already discussed offer several possible explanations for persistence.
Repeated reinforcement may keep a conviction active, while integration with memories, habits, plans, and other convictions can make it harder to disturb. Social surroundings may continually renew it, and recurring circumstances can reactivate the same pattern.
Different forms of persistence may have different support.
The persistence of "fire burns" is not obviously sustained in the same way as the persistence of "family matters."
One is repeatedly reinforced through a stable class of interactions.
The other may be integrated with relationships, identity, memories, obligations, hopes, and a life history.
The word persistence describes the temporal phenomenon.
It does not tell us why the phenomenon occurs.
Questions show related patterns.
Some disappear when a sufficiently convincing answer arrives.
"Where is the station?"
Once you arrive, the question no longer participates in orientation.
"How do I reset this device?"
Once the procedure is learned and the problem solved, the question may vanish.
Other questions recur.
"What should I do with my life?" can seem settled at twenty-five and return at forty.
Some questions appear to persist through changing answers.
Questions concerning justice, meaning, consciousness, knowledge, or how to live can remain active in a person's life even while successive answers become convincing for a time.
What gives rise to them may be too broad or persistent to be exhausted by one answer. But persistent questions need not persist for the same reason at all.
Persistent questions matter because conviction does not simply accumulate until everything has been settled.
What has settled in orientation can become unsettled again.