"time machine September 15, 2013

I googled and found an entry by me, which I quoted here, and lost. That's okay. Look up "you all look so wrinkled and so young" if you care to check it out....

That was a direct lift from a Google entry by me. Shock! I turn a corner and meet me. I was checking that line of Eliot’s I quoted and found me quoting it. (I still have to make sure that’s the right wording and source.) I wanted to use it, the line, because of my experience yesterday, attending the Chancellor’s Tea at the University of Manitoba, held during Homecoming and especially honouring five-year alumni. It has been 65 years since I received my first (Dble. Hons.) degree in 1951. I specify Double Honours because it meant an extra year to get it and I don’t know any graduates from that year, as my cohorts left the coop in 1950 - without a convocation because 1950 was the Year of the Flood in Winnipeg before Duff’s Ditch.I won’t go into any more detail here. Do I have to tell you everything?

Where was I?

Looking for that line. Did I check it in 2013? I usually do. I can’t now because I’m not at home. I still have all my Eliot books, nicely marked up, but I can’t get them right now. I’ll check when I return - today, as a matter of fact. but I’ll be tired, and I have an Icelandic class tonight and a spreadsheet lesson tomorrow morning and physio therapy in the afternoon and then there’s laundry, so it might take a while.

It’s a good line, though. Maybe I said it.

Sunday morning: I’m still in Winnipeg, going today to the Chancellor’s Tea at the University of Manitoba as part of the Homecoming celebration - celebrating the 65th anniversary of my first degree, a double honours B.A. in English and French B.A. The following year I got my M.A. in English, majoring in 20th century poetry; thesis on W.H. Auden, with a minor in Old English and Old Norse. Seventeen days after I graduated I married. Twenty years later my husband died. There’s the first half of my life in microcosm. I’ve done a lot since then.

Yesterday I went to the new Museum of Human Rights. My friend said it should be called the Museum of Human Wrongs, with its painstaking records of inhumanity, intolerance and cruelty, They are very moving and powerfully presented in a beautiful building.

Last night I went to the first performance in the new series of Virtuosi performances: Peter Vinograde, pianist, playing Bach, Beethoven Rachmaninoff and Albéniz. Wow.

I have often said that we take in more information and imbibe more “peak experiences “ (Maslow’s phrase) in a day or a week than people used to do in a month - or a year - in the past. I know I always seem to have a lot to assimilate. Sometimes i feel like an amoeba just wrapping myself around stuff, hoping to digest it or make it a part of me. (Actually, I have no idea what an amoeba feels like.)

This plethora of pleasure, this surfeit of satiation, this overload of consumption is dangerous for several reasons. One is that you get inured to it, two is that you get so accustomed to it that you don’t appreciate it. Three is that you expect it, and constantly demand it. You see mothers giving “treats” to their children. I have observed that a treat is no longer a treat, it’s a given, not even a given, a routine requirement.

And there’s more to come.