Looking Back

It’s so strange to see someone watching herself dance 75 years ago. The image of a 102-year-old woman juxtaposed with her youthful, beautiful, and vital self is unsettling, and makes you think thoughts that you often ignore.    


You could see through her eyes that she’s reliving it—she can hear the music and feel its rhythm, feel her feet as they strike the floor, feel the adrenaline rush of doing what she likes best and doing it good.
Someone once said not to fear growing old, because it is a privilege denied to many. That’s true, of course, but there are moments when one feels that growing old is the saddest thing that happens to us.
She’s remembering it all. It’s all in her head still. She was beautiful, she was lithe, and she was a really great dancer.
I guess that’s what our most precious possessions are—our memories. We are still 12 or 16 or 21 inside.



We’ll all grow old and die someday, but we pretend that we are immortal. We’ll see our loved ones grow old and die, or they’ll see us grow old and die, and everyone will suffer devastating loses that are too much for anybody to bear.
You’d think that that is enough for us to treat each other with compassion and love, but no. We go out of our way to be cruel and be simply mean to others, just because we can. We join clubs to be exclusive, then form a clique within that club to be even moreexclusive.
We have different religions that claims to spread love and peace, but the opposite is happening. We discriminate, or we simply kill people, who don’t worship the same gods we do. It’s a scary world out there, and the various religions with all their promises did not make the world a safer place for the billions of people out there.
At the end of the day, we are reduced to our memories of what we once were. So goddamn it, let’s all make memories that we can look back on, memories that can make us smile and say to ourselves, “Damn, I was an awesome, badass mofo.”

Didn’t mean to be so morbid, but as I said, this video of Miss Alice Barker made me think of things that we often ignore.
Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist — a master — and that is what Auguste Rodin was — can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is… and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be…. and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart…. no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired — but it does to them. Look at her!

Jubal Harshaw, Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein


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