The Skies Are Falling

We are creatures bound by time. Our lives have a beginning and an end, a finite period of time, which we hasten to chop into equal segments years, months, days, hours in the vain hope that through this frantic counting we can somehow control its passage. But time always has the upper hand: we do grow older and we die, not knowing when, not knowing how. This well-known fact, which many people may simply brush aside as obvious, some as too disturbing, or others as just depressing, is the single most fundamental aspect of our existence. It is what gives meaning to being human.

Death gives rise to our yearning for permanence, to our constant struggle to create, be it a painting or a family, a mathematical theorem or a new recipe, something that will stay after we go, something beyond the mere memory of out existence in the minds of our friends or relatives. Memories fade from generation to generation. A few years ago, while exploring some forgotten corners of my parents attic, I bumped into my grandparents photo albums, packed with hundreds of yellowed photographs of their parties, relatives, friends, celebrations, and Rogerio quipped, in his unique sardonic style. Looking at the pictures, I wondered how much of that laughter, of that wisdom, of their many stories, is still alive in the minds of their great-grandchildren. Feeling like the missing link of a four-generation chain, I closed the albums with a deep sense of sadness, of having lost a part of my own history, now buried in photos I can’t recognize.

But wait! Close to the photo albums there was a large box, made of golden cardboard. Inside I found dozens of letters my grandparents wrote to each other, to their relatives in Ukraine and Russia, to my parents when my father was studying in Boston in the early 1950s. Extremely excited. I asked Lenore Grenoble, a friend in the linguisties department a specialist in Eastern European and Slavic languages to help me translate the letters. But my initial excitement quickly turned into disappointment; the letters were painfully boxing, full of endless details of everyday life. No deep existential message, no deep secret revealed, nothing!

It dawns on me just how selfish we the living can be. I was not trying to get to know my ancestors better; the letters and photos could have helped me with that. What I really wanted was to get to know myself better through them. After all, their history is my history, their lives part of mine, where I grew up, who my parents were. But we can’t expect the past to define our future completely. Our ancestor’s lives and lessons may teach and guide, but we are the ones who must make choices.