Creative Senior Moments

by Claude Lambert



  Claude Lambert

  Creative Senior Moments

  I want to be thoroughly used up when I die.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Creative Senior moments

  by Claude Lambert

  Copyright © 2012 Claude Lambert

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN: 978-0-9836791-9-6

  This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Idiots

  Languages

  Truth

  Loneliness

  Friends

  Equality

  Narcissism

  Denial

  Brain

  Survival Skills

  Social Behavior

  Human Rights

  Torture

  Looting

  Dallas

  Politicians

  Democracy

  Stability

  Corruption

  History

  Laziness

  Attila Returns

  Bad People

  Humiliation

  Jails

  Punishment

  Money

  Cultural Literacy

  Obesity

  Sex

  Inventions

  Plumbing

  Nixon

  Business

  Lent

  Terrorism

  Health Care

  Marriage

  Economy

  Laugh

  Introduction

  I am very fond of the biography of great achievers in any field, but my life is not remarkable, and although I am proud of it, I don’t think that the story of my life is interesting to anybody else. What I learned, however, what any old woman learns through life, is food for thought, delightful or stodgy. These are some of the things I did not know when I was twenty. I didn’t think that I knew everything, but was convinced I had good principles. Then, I fell flat on my face.

  Aging thoughts of course are like aging cheese. You got to know when to start eating.

  Keywords (cross-referenced topics in alphabetic order)

  Attila Returns, Bad People, Brain, Business, Corruption, Cultural Literacy, Dallas, Democracy, Denial, Economy, Equality, Friends, Health Care, History, Human Rights, Humiliation, Idiots, Inventions, Jails, Laugh, Languages, Laziness, Lent, Loneliness, Looting, Marriage, Money, Narcissism, Nixon, Obesity, Plumbing, Politicians, Punishment, Sex, Social Behavior, Stability, Survival Skills, Terrorism, Torture, Truth.

  Idiots

  The World Is Full Of Idiots

  I wish somebody had told me this when I was twenty years old: the world is full of idiots. It would have changed my life, I would have been happier, more efficient, and it would have spared me considerable pain. I would have given up being stressed out and trying in vain to treat this case by case, as if decency obliged me to correct such accidents of nature. Once you know this for a fact, you can choose to ignore that it is a problem or you can try to solve it. The worst thing you can do is what I did all my life: treat each case you meet as an accident.

  Languages

  I am born in Belgium, a very small country surrounded by four strong cultures: Dutch, German, English and French. The difficulty for us is not to learn languages, it is to find our own identity. My father insisted that I learned to read books in any European language. He thought it was “basic.” Later, I learned enough Hebrew to read the Bible. Once I learned Latin and Greek, and as Dutch was mandatory in school, it was rather easy for me to access reading in many European languages, though Hungarian is a real pain, because it is entirely different and has no link to the others. My father gave me a Hungarian dictionary together with a translation of Cyrano de Bergerac, my favorite play as a teenager. It is a good thing I knew the French original by heart.

  My mother had an interest in the many vernacular languages of France. Her father spoke French and Corsican, her mother French and Walloon. Her parents were born in the 1880s, when most Europeans still spoke two languages: their own dialect and the official language of their country. Half of the world still is raised in two languages, probably for the same political reasons.

  I have a very bad connection between hearing a sound and reproducing it, so I do not sing, and I do not speak any language at all.

  Why was it important for my parents? I think it stemmed from them being anti-fascists. Let me explain this. They opposed the ideology of European Nazism to the birth of Democracy in Greece. Learning Greek and Latin was getting access to dreams of beauty, democracy, free speech, hope for humanity. I never heard them speak of the sad realities of life in ancient Greece, such as slavery and the poor condition of women. It was all idealized, because it was the reverse of the obscurantism they suffered from, fascism. As a result, they prevented me to go into the mathematics section I yearned for, because math studies did not allow a sufficient formation in antique languages. My parents often spoke in Latin to each other or exchanged quotes.

  What did I learn from this?

  1. Learning languages is no big deal in a family who thinks it is natural and ethical.

  In most countries, there is a political will to unite under one language. Where that will is strong, the vernacular dialects disappear. Although dialects may disappear quickly, resentment may last centuries.

  2. As technological progress is limited to a few countries, a lot of languages cannot keep up. Scientific Irish, to give one example, is very irritating to read, because the creation of new words comes from a few scholars. It does not come from the heart. French, despite a few successes like ordinateur for computer is even worse, because new words come from a committee.

  3. The death of languages follows the same rules as species extinction: no space, no food, no respect, no future.

  4. Reading is natural in a family that reads.

  5. Thinking in different languages makes you somewhat schizophrenic, because it is impossible to think exactly the same way in a different language: each language is the expression of a culture, and you cannot get rid of the cultural context. I thought it came from some defect of my brain, but it is the common rule rather than the exception. It explains the Italian proverb Traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor). It is the nature of the beast.

  6. A magnificent example of the cultural differences manifested in languages came from a friend of mine who confessed, “I make love in French, I pray in Brazilian and I swear in Yiddish.”

  It beats the European king Charles V (1500-1558) who used to say, “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.” Like most people from Belgium, I remain convinced that he said all this in Flemish (he was born in the Belgian town of Ghent.)

  7. Also very well felt is this judgment by Paul Drexler, “I find it is sadder to be sad in German, more cuddly to be cuddly, and I know of no better language in which to get drunk.” (The German Puzzle: My Search for the Missing Pieces)

  8. Of course the last word always belongs to Mark Twain. Here he is learning German:

  “Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that s
hows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print – I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

  Gretchen. ‘Wilhelm, where is the turnip?’

  Wilhelm. ‘She has gone to the kitchen. ‘

  Gretchen. ‘Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?’

  Wilhelm. ‘It has gone to the opera.’”

  9. If you know 20 words of the language of any country on any continent, people will be 20 times nicer to you.

  10. One of the ways we should fight racism in any country is to always impose two languages in school. It is not foolproof, but it helps opening the mind.

  11. I always thought that some of Bertrand Russel’s mathematical work in the field of the theory of logical relations is wrong because it mainly made sense using the English language and it did not work as well for foreigners, outsiders or other outliers like me. However, I never gave this enough time to demonstrate it, as life is so short. I went back to Mark Twain and what he aptly calls the perplexity of the foreigner.

  Truth

  The truth is, nobody cares about the truth. Where it is most needed, in religion or in politics, there is no truth, there is just conviction.

  However, we all need access to the truth. It is the difference between democracy and other regimes: in democracies, it may take a lot of work, but you have access to the truth. In non-democratic countries, you are just denied access. I discovered that early in the U.S.S.R. The official newspaper, the Pravda, was so afraid of any kind of truth, that they would deny bad weather and natural catastrophes. There has been a lot of the same attitude in China for decades. In a society of lies, the lies are pervasive and invade everybody’s life.

  ***

  This being said, there are lies that I am perfectly comfortable with. I don’t want anybody to tell me that Robin Hood did not wear tights; it spoils the fun. I don’t want to know that George Washington was a mediocre general; just leave it alone. I am more comfortable with the real life of Jefferson, probably because his catastrophic humanity is so close to ours.

  Conversely, I don’t want to learn anything good about bad people, be it Hitler, Stalin or Ted Bundy. I was filled with horror when Eichmann, responsible for the death of millions of Jews, said “My sensitive nature revolted at the sight of corpses and blood.” It made even more deeply horrible the man who also said “I will gladly jump into my grave in the knowledge that five million enemies of the Reich have already died like animals.”

  Loneliness

  What became of my friends?

  Love is dead.

  They were friends that the wind sweeps away

  And it blew in front of my door,

  Took them away.

  Rutebeuf, French poet, 1230-1285

  I lived alone for over 40 years. Do I ever feel lonely? Sure. When I do, I go out and I volunteer for something, make friends or not, just be nice to somebody who needs it, talk a little. Never feel lonely for more than 2 minutes, it is unhealthy. Take action.

  What makes difficult to live alone is that you cannot tell anybody the inconsequential things of your life: that you are going to the dentist, that you have bills to pay, that you just cooked something wonderful. Lots of people say it on Facebook or on Twitter. What baffles me is not the person who tells, it is the reader. Who reads that stuff? What are these readers doing with their time? What kind of job do they have? How do they use their time? It is a deep mystery.

  What one used to confide to a husband while he was taking off his socks, we now announce to the world. What does the world do with all this useless information? Take off its socks?

  ***

  It is great to have new ways of expressing ourselves. It is inconvenient that we now face a narcissistic generation.

  ***

  Of course there is a deeper loneliness, when you cannot really share your thoughts because frankly, there is nobody to share with. Take Bertrand Russell. He was so lonely when he was young that he held imaginary conversation with the poet Shelley. “… knowing no one to whom I could speak of what I thought or felt, I used to reflect how wonderful it would have been to know Shelley, and to wonder whether I should meet any live human being with whom I should feel so much sympathy.” It would have made an interesting relationship and it shows how unhappy Russell was. It always makes me smile, imagining Lord Byron, Shelley and Bertrand Russell together. I don’t think it would have worked.

  Personally, if I had to find a friend in British Victorian times, I would prefer to spend an evening with Alexander Graham Bell (we would not dare disturbing Darwin, would we?) Romanticism is not my taste at all, I can’t recall liking any romantic author, except of course Victor Hugo, because he was a social author.

  Friends

  Just like Russell liked Shelley, we all have friends in the past. I have a translated collection of women’s letters that are four thousand years old, and there is a girl I am still aching to speak to, because of the way that she describes her desolation at a dancer’s death.

  There are actors or performers that we never met, but it hurts us to see them on screen knowing that they are dead. Sometimes we are haunted by the irony of a tragedy, like playing Superman and becoming paraplegic.

  Sometimes we just know how people think. I know how Kierkegaard thought, because I felt like him when I was fifteen: I could have written his Journal. Happily for me, I snapped out of it, he didn’t: he died too young.

  My heart bleeds for the British actor Michael Caine. I do know that he is lucky, he has a wonderful wife and grand children and he has enough money. I also know what goes on in his mind on a bad day.

  I never quite recovered from the early death of the Swiss philosopher Pierre Thevenaz, who introduced me to phenomenology well after his death. His death has pained me for over 50 years.

  You may know that President Roosevelt was cheerful and always surrounded by friends and family, but if you visit the Little White House in Warm Springs, you’ll get an overwhelming feeling of loneliness. It made me cry. My father was like that.

  Such are the friends we never met, a source of sudden joys and permanent desolation. Real-life friends are more like comfort food, a source of unabated joy.

  Equality

  Kids are born Smart, but not Equal

  The magnificent idea that we are all created equal required a genius to see it, because it is not true. We should be, try to be, fight to be, equal in rights. But we certainly are not born equal. The chances of success still largely depend on economic status, though less in the US than in most European countries. Look at this USA government table: it is dated, but the numbers do not change that fast.

  Percentage of children ages 5 to 17 who have difficulty performing everyday activities by family socioeconomic status, 1994

  a) Total percentage of children with difficulty performing everyday activities does not add to the sum of different categories (difficulty with learning, etc.) because some children fall into more than one category.

  b) Parental education is defined as the highest education of an adult in the family.

  NOTE: While this table presents four measures of children’s ability, it does not include every area where a child may experience difficulty. For example, it does not include all visual or hearing impairments. The measures included here are defined as follows: Difficulty with mobility includes difficulty getting around the home and use of special equipment for a period of 12 months or more or having a physical delay. Difficulty with self-care is defined as having difficulty for 12 months or more with bathing, dressing, eating, or toileting. Difficulty with communication represents children who have had difficulty for 12 months or more communicating with persons, family or non-family, difficulty understanding others, or who have a problem or delay in speech development. Difficulty in learning includes having significant problems at school understanding materials, paying attention in class, controlling behavior, or having a problem or
delay in mental development, a problem or delay in emotional development, or a reported learning disability. This measure reflects a re-conceptualization of children’s limitations and difficulties, by capturing more detailed dimensions.

  Source: Table from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, National Health Interview Survey on Disability.

  What does this table show? It shows that children who are born below the poverty level and children who live with only one parent are almost twice as likely to have learning difficulties. It does not say that it is unavoidable or that children cannot conquer their difficulties.

  It seems to me that parents and teachers should remain aware of children’s circumstances and work twice as much when circumstances require it.

  A member of Yo-Yo Ma’s family said that it takes three generations of wealth to make a musician. Some great musicians, like Quincy Jones, are born in the utmost misery, but it is not the rule. Musicians, like doctors and lawyers and writers, more often than not come out of the middle class.

  This being said, having difficulties with something still leaves you with an opportunity to win plus you are probably bright at something else.

  We live in a society that often equates “fast” with intelligence. For instance: performing fast on a math test can give your child access to the next level. Then, everybody thinks that your kid is smart. We do not apply the same judgment to a lot of other great accomplishments, such as reading music or distinguishing differences in colors’ intensities. Why not? It is just a cultural bias. A student slow in writing, because for instance, she is dyslexic, often is underestimated, even if she is not any less creative than the others.

  Our culture has a narrow view of intelligence that is not based on any scientific facts or on good sense. There are thousands of ways of being intelligent and smart, and everybody inherits a lot of these ways. Nobody has them all. Learning difficulties should not blind us to the multiple intelligences of children. Many children in my neighborhood are under the impression that they are dumb, because school is difficult for them. They become the prey of choice for gangs. No child left behind should mean: we should focus on each child’s unique talents.

  What we hear: some of us have a perfect pitch, other don’t. Some of us discriminate sounds (they can hear that the second violin made a mistake), other don’t (they hear a magma of sounds).

  What we see: some of us have such a good visual memory that they see if a pen has been moved on their desk, some of us would not see that their car was stolen unless they need it. Some of us only see what is on the right side of the street: you ask kids what is in front of the school or on the other side of the mall, many have no idea.