Offline Generations
Suppose you’ve reached your peak earning power. Suppose you own technological devices your parents don't know exist. Suppose you’re web fluent and are proficient at googling for information or finding & buying old books. Then think how odd it is to imagine that your parents have a knowledge that all the money, books, and internet sites can’t buy: They have time-traveled.
Of course they haven’t time-traveled relative to their existence but they have relative to yours. They have experienced an age we can only read about and they know ancestors we have never met. How odd! In our self-centeredness we might imagine that their lives began when we became aware of ours. They were born at 37, right?
The young are not used to limits, physical or otherwise. But our elders have experienced another world, one that is neither transferrable nor inheritable. I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s and my parents were born in the '30s and grew up in the '40s. There is no way for me to fully understand what the '40s were like no matter how much I might think I do. Even should I understand what the '40s were like I wouldn't know it, having no frame of reference. Books and photographs help but there is something irreplaceable in actually being there.
That my father was once a child is something I know from a photograph but it is still an abstract thought. I see him, he is smiling shyly, but that is not my father in any material way. Perhaps I'll grant that it is what my father might've looked like when he was young. That he had a mother is another abstract notion since she died before I was born. That he knew her as well as I know my own mother is completely foreign. I don’t have access to him interacting with her and on this earth there’s no password to gain it. There is no way I can imagine what my relationship would've been with her, or how my father's history would've been altered had she lived longer. If minute differences - such as words of praise or criticism that linger - alter us in profound ways, then something as large as an early death can also alter us in profound, if unknowable, ways.
No comments:
Post a Comment