"To be is to be perceived." Berkeley.
And, within the realms of popular culture, Scully said something very similar on the X-Files during one episode. I don't remember the exact context, but she was commenting on the possibility that we are who we are perceived to be.
I took my great-grandmother, Dearie, to lunch one day when I was home from college. Pizza again. She loved pizza. And coffee. I was curious about her mind. What thoughts lived there. And so I asked her. She chewed on her slice of cheese pizza and stared at the dish piled high with slices before her. I was afraid that she might not understand what I meant. Some people don't. And, at this point, she wasn't as hip as she'd once been.
But at last, she swallowed some black coffee and made a reply that left me thinking for years.
She said, "I think about all of my family - my mama, my brothers and sisters, my daddy - and I think about my friends and about how they've all gone. I'm the only one left."
I told her that she still had family left - me, my mom, my grandmother - and that we all loved her.
But she shook her neatly curled head and said, "I know. But there's nobody left that remembers me when I was a girl. Everybody else just thinks of me as an old lady."
"To be is to be perceived."
Your moments make you who you are. Then they float on down the river. And then you only have those people who shared your moments with you to revive them. When the only people left to you are the ones who view you as an old lady, I suppose you really are an old lady. But if you have just that one person who remembers you turning cartwheels on the front lawn in June, maybe you are more than that.
I took my great-grandmother, Dearie, to lunch one day when I was home from college. Pizza again. She loved pizza. And coffee. I was curious about her mind. What thoughts lived there. And so I asked her. She chewed on her slice of cheese pizza and stared at the dish piled high with slices before her. I was afraid that she might not understand what I meant. Some people don't. And, at this point, she wasn't as hip as she'd once been.
But at last, she swallowed some black coffee and made a reply that left me thinking for years.
She said, "I think about all of my family - my mama, my brothers and sisters, my daddy - and I think about my friends and about how they've all gone. I'm the only one left."
I told her that she still had family left - me, my mom, my grandmother - and that we all loved her.
But she shook her neatly curled head and said, "I know. But there's nobody left that remembers me when I was a girl. Everybody else just thinks of me as an old lady."
"To be is to be perceived."
Your moments make you who you are. Then they float on down the river. And then you only have those people who shared your moments with you to revive them. When the only people left to you are the ones who view you as an old lady, I suppose you really are an old lady. But if you have just that one person who remembers you turning cartwheels on the front lawn in June, maybe you are more than that.
posted by Autumn at 6:29 PM
2 Comments:
my dad said the same thing when his mother died, this extreme sorrow for the loss of a time when he was innocent, he said his childhood was gone,
how strange and sad it must be, to be the only person left who survied a desperate battle or who starred in a groundbreaking film, it pulls my strings, cracks my brittle core to imagine being there, it is inevitable, to have no one who recalls you at the various points in your development,
it gets even more pronounced when you are in motion, no one knows the me i was 2 years ago now, i am only the me of the present, it makes the inevitable lighter ssomhow to ssurvivie it on a small scale each year, as i move and shed the skin,
life is so mysterious, there is no mastering it,
sssorry about the extra sss, the overzealous keyboard,
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