What was he thinking, feeling, 15 years ago? We watched him, now our Silicon Valley start-up grandson, leave us, walking along the Pacific alone. He was headed back to his last month of college life after a semester in Costa Rica for his double biology/Spanish major. We had spent five days together in Costa Rica’s Corcovado national park on the Osa peninsula. We’d seen a puma, monkeys. He was happy one moment, pensive the next. “I love being a kid. I don’t really ever want to grow up.”
Que pensait-il, ressentait-il, il y a 15 ans? Nous l’avons regardé, notre petit-fils, maintenant “entrepreneur en démarrage dans La Silicon Valley,” nous quitter, marchant le long du Pacifique, seul. Il retournait a son dernier mois de la vie universitaire après un semestre au Costa Rica pour sa spécialité biologie-espagnol. On avait passé 5 jours ensemble dans le parc national de Corcovado sur la péninsule d’Osa. Nous avons vu un puma, des singes. Il était heureux un moment, pensif le suivant. “J’adore être un gosse. Je ne veux jamais grandir.”
My dear friend Deborah gave me this scarf for my birthday. It’s a gigantic map of Paris. I love it. It has become my ‘Ningaminny,’ a word my older brother invented when he was two, dragging his ‘blanky’ behind him, sucking his thumb. What I love is that the scarf shows my address when I was a student in Paris in 1952, 66 Avenue de Saxe. The Pasteur statue was just a little way from our apartment. What great memories!
Ma chère amie Deborah m’a présenté cette écarpe pour ma fête, un plan gigantesque de Paris. Je l’adore. Elle (l’écharpe) est devenue mon “Ningaminny”, un mot inventé par mon frère aîné quand il avait 2 ans, traînant sa petite couverture derrière lui en souçant son pouce. Ce que j’aime, c’est que l’écharpe montre mon adresse en 1952 quand j’étais étudiante à Paris, 66 avenue de Saxe. Le monument Pasteur était à deux pas de notre appartement. Quels beaux souvenirs!
With Feminism ruling the waves today, and, unavoidably, waving the rules of antiquated patriarchal society, I hesitate to bring up Freud. Women may come after me with knives. Freud is that misguided physician whose distorted mind dreamed up the original envy idea, one focused upon the male organ. But I am a woman too, a very liberal one, and I have a knife that I’ve had to confront. It has cut me in the past. I grew up unaware that I longed, perhaps from a year beyond toddler age, to have what my baby brother was born with. My envy was not only buried, but ruthless. If I couldn’t have one, then, in a slicing act of magic, my tiny wand removed my brother’s as well. And along with my brother’s, all males’. The thing interred, however, festered. It sent up surface quirks, such as an allergy to bananas.
Avec le Féminisme régnant sur les mers aujourd’hui, et, inévitablement, dominant les vagues de la société patriarcale, j’hésite à évoquer Freud. Les femmes peuvent me poursuivre avec des couteaux. Freud est ce médecin erroné dont le cerveau dénaturé a imaginé l’idée originale de l’envie, une envie axée sur l’organe mâle. Mais je suis aussi une femme, et très libérale, et j’ai un couteau que j’ai été obligée d’affronter. Il m’a coupée dans le passé. I’ai grandi dans l’ignorance que je désirais ardemment depuis l’âge d’un tout petit, d’en avoir un comme celui qui ornait mon petit frère. Mon envie était non seulement enterrée, mais impitoyable. Si je n’en possédais pas un, alors, dans un coup de magie tranchante, ma petite baguette a enlevé celui de mon frère aussi. Et, accompagnant le-sien, ceux de tous les mâles. La chose enterrée, pourtant, c’est encrassée. Elle a envoyé des signaux de surface, tels qu’une allergie aux bananes.
When an 85 year old writes those words everyone assumes I’m the one about to leave this world, right? Quite the opposite. My sadness is watching humanity die before my eyes while I go on living.
We are losing our human selves in ‘great clumps on the hairbrush of information technology’ daily. Hairbrush? What a startling metaphor. But it is apt because IT bristles and yanks at the lovely tresses of what we humans do best: look and smile at each other, listen to and empathize with each other, spend time with one another. It is true that we are flawed in our human relationships, interrupting and tuning each other out. But as long as we still can read signs of distress or delight in our fellow human faces we keep those hairs from falling out; we have hopes of training them. But instead aren’t we shedding them to emojis? Our smartphones are coming between us, taking us over.
It seems it is not only to each other, but we can no longer even relate directly to our natural world. It used to be second nature to go to the park, climb a tree or vacation in a camp ground in the woods. Someone just sent us a weird article titled “Forest Bathing: How Trees Can Help you Find Health and Happiness.” (Time by Qing Li, May 1, 2018.) Why do we need someone to tell us this? Are our lives becoming so alienated from a bunch of trees that we need them poured into a warm tub for us? Such preciousness shows another strand of our humanness, feet on the grassy ground, being brushed away. “Experts” are combing our natural world into such an odd ‘do’ that it makes it unrecognizable. I.T. forces us to use our 24 hour daily ration of time either on terra firma connecting to its wonders and each other or on the insatiable web. Yes, the web does bring us our entire planet’s miracles at a fingernail tap, but at such a cost of time and energy that we lose ourselves, falling in bed exhausted. Now that is human at least. But IT is surely on the greedy hunt to snag our last 8 hours, those we sleep.
When I step onto the web I sense myself leaving my lovable old world behind. I choose I.T. over time with friends and try not to “pick up that hairbrush” often. I feel someone stealing my walk in the woods, repackaging it into bathtub. It isn’t Dr. Qing Li’s fault, it is I.T. coming between me and the forest. I, like everybody else, have become a little alien to who I once was. I too have taken that giant step towards moving beyond my humanness. For my French student friends, the last paragraph here:
Quand je mets le pied sur la ‘toile’ je me sens partir du monde que j’adore. Je choisis, bien sûr, Le “TI” en préférence au temps passé avec amis, et j’essaie de ne pas saisir cette brosse à cheveux souvent. J’ai le sens d’être volée de ma balade en bois, convertie en baignoire. Ce n’est pas la faute du docteur Qing Li; c’est la technologie informatique me séparant de la forêt. Moi, comme tout le monde, je suis devenue un peu éloignée de celle que j’étais autrefois. J’ai pris, comme tous les autres, ce pas de géant qui me mène au delà de mon humanité
