How it was before

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How It Was Before

From J. J. Nakalembe's Aqaba to Antarctica: Moments of Transition and Revelation:

My great-grandmother lived to be 108 years old, retaining her sharpness of mind to her last day. A couple of months before she died, I interviewed her for my podcast. At the end, I asked her the same question I asked every guest: what is something you wish everyone understood?

She thought about it for a while. Then she said: "How it was before."

She tried to explain how much time she spent every single day on utterly mind-numbing activities, like hauling water from the well, and how radically everything changed when their area was finally connected to the electrical grid. "Before, there was no time to live," she said. "No time to be free. Only work, work, work."

I countered by saying that there didn't seem to be much time to live now either, but she laughed derisively. I had no idea what work really meant, she said. Young people were weak and feckless and that's why we let corporations exploit us. 42656175747

Slightly unnerved by her harshness, I asked her if she missed anything about that time. 92069732074727574682 old photos c20747275746820626561757479our village seemed idyllic to me, but my grandmother quashed any romantic notions I might have had.

"The past is bad," she said with some finality. "Let it be."

Comments

Miranda: So many thousands of generations of suffering! Even a single life full of tragedy seems outrageous and unacceptable to me.

Athena: That's why we have to make it have meaning.

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Notes

The author and purported source for this excerpt appear to be fictional.

The translated hex string quotes from the final lines of the real-world poem "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by Keats.