Stuck in quarantine and bored? It’s time to rummage through the old photo albums and loose pictures stored in shoeboxes under the couch. Go ahead, get them out. I’ll wait a moment…
There! That’s you as a baby: Cute, innocent, unaware even that your own feet exist. And that’s the picture when you first noticed your feet or hands, the beginning of self-discovery. There you are on an early birthday; you don’t know which, but maybe your third or fourth. School days next, elementary school through awkward teenage high school years. Look, there are the photos related to job, college, wedding, outing with friends or family, mug shot, whatever, all of them seeming to fall in a sequence of individual events, each of them marking a point on a line, and that line perceived as the same line, a continuum of your life.
And yet, how real is the line? How real are the connections between the photos of that baby, the child, the teen, the young adult, and the person whose image you see in a mirror today?
If you are interested in how you came to be the person you currently are, that’s an interest worth some introspection. Can you actually recognize a continuum? Or do you see your life in those photos like the saccades of eyes scanning the lines of an autobiography?
Remember “The Rainbow” by Wordsworth? Oh! right; that’s the title given it by people not named Wordsworth. You might know it from its first line, “My Heart Leaps Up,” or from its most famous line, “The Child is father of the Man.” Many have repeated that famous thought, even the bands Beach Boys and Blood, Sweat, and Tears, the latter group changing it to “Child is father to the man.”
Was that baby your parent? Did that baby in the photo engender your character? What are the connections you see among those photos other than some similar facial features? Does each photo represent a different “parent” of the person you see in your latest selfie?
Is your life a continuum or a discontinuous series of individuals represented by those photos? There’s a Calculus here that begs another question. Is the continuum of your life something you merely impose from the perspective of a personal history? Are you the living manifestation of an arrow flying smoothly or one moving in jerks from position to position?
Would you argue that the film of your life is actually a sequence of still photos? Is your life a demonstration of Xeno’s paradox or its resolution? Scan those pictures now laid out in sequence on the coffee table. Is that baby in the first photo parent to one, some, or all of the others? Or is it an ancient ancestor with only a distant relationship, like the one that joins you loosely to your Great-great-great-great Grandfather? Are all those photos “generations” of you?
There! That’s you as a baby: Cute, innocent, unaware even that your own feet exist. And that’s the picture when you first noticed your feet or hands, the beginning of self-discovery. There you are on an early birthday; you don’t know which, but maybe your third or fourth. School days next, elementary school through awkward teenage high school years. Look, there are the photos related to job, college, wedding, outing with friends or family, mug shot, whatever, all of them seeming to fall in a sequence of individual events, each of them marking a point on a line, and that line perceived as the same line, a continuum of your life.
And yet, how real is the line? How real are the connections between the photos of that baby, the child, the teen, the young adult, and the person whose image you see in a mirror today?
If you are interested in how you came to be the person you currently are, that’s an interest worth some introspection. Can you actually recognize a continuum? Or do you see your life in those photos like the saccades of eyes scanning the lines of an autobiography?
Remember “The Rainbow” by Wordsworth? Oh! right; that’s the title given it by people not named Wordsworth. You might know it from its first line, “My Heart Leaps Up,” or from its most famous line, “The Child is father of the Man.” Many have repeated that famous thought, even the bands Beach Boys and Blood, Sweat, and Tears, the latter group changing it to “Child is father to the man.”
Was that baby your parent? Did that baby in the photo engender your character? What are the connections you see among those photos other than some similar facial features? Does each photo represent a different “parent” of the person you see in your latest selfie?
Is your life a continuum or a discontinuous series of individuals represented by those photos? There’s a Calculus here that begs another question. Is the continuum of your life something you merely impose from the perspective of a personal history? Are you the living manifestation of an arrow flying smoothly or one moving in jerks from position to position?
Would you argue that the film of your life is actually a sequence of still photos? Is your life a demonstration of Xeno’s paradox or its resolution? Scan those pictures now laid out in sequence on the coffee table. Is that baby in the first photo parent to one, some, or all of the others? Or is it an ancient ancestor with only a distant relationship, like the one that joins you loosely to your Great-great-great-great Grandfather? Are all those photos “generations” of you?
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