A Life Lived in Reverse Would Be Ideal

I saw the film The Curious Case of Benjamin Button a while ago. It wasn’t one of the best films I have seen, but I liked it. The film is based on the short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald and portrays a man who lives his life backwards.

Today I read an essay by British philosopher of religion Pamela Sue Anderson. In the essay, she quotes Søren Kirkegaard:

It is quite true what philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards. The more one ponders this, the more it comes to mean that life in temporal existence never becomes quite intelligible, precisely because at no moment can I find complete quiet to take the backwards-looking position.

I don’t know why, but when I read this, my first thought was that the story of Benjamin Button is an attempt to solve that problem. If we were born old and lived to be younger, we could make better use of our youth. With the problem of youth being inexperience and the problem of old age being fatigue, a life lived in reverse would be ideal.