I remember a photograph taken in 1999, six months before the turn of the millennium and four months after my third birthday. I am sitting on my bottom with my legs coupled on one side. Before my knees, my orange cat, Tigger, named after my favourite Winnie the Pooh character, rests. The grass is cut short, and behind my body, splitting the image in half, the windbreaker pines my father planted years earlier loom overhead. Blonde hair, long and thin, sits atop my shoulders. I am skinny and misfit, awkward and shy. My arm stretches toward Tigger as he walks away. Even more passive in childhood than I am in adulthood, I let him leave. I sat still in hopes he might return, that he might want me. “Please, want me.”
As a child, I loved to be photographed. And with each flash, the camera wrote the lonely oceans of my eyes in light.
Despite their loneliness, my eyes still represent comfort in part because they bind together past and present. When I see a photograph, I remember: I was there; those eyes are me.
The kinds of comforts and continuities I see in childhood photographs are the exceptions, not the rule, of historical experience. During his exile in Paris in 1936, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin did not write about his new life in France, the rise of the Nazi regime, nor the impending European war. Instead, he wrote about the disappearance of storytellers and the history of oral traditions. Benjamin noticed that after the First World War, stories usually passed down for much of human history via the spoken word (think of Homer’s epics, German folktales, or Beowulf) could only be found between book covers. In Benjamin’s view, taciturn books could only displace the living voice of storytellers because the values of the social world had changed. Human life, long considered a vessel for divine wisdom, became rapidly expendable over the course of the early 20th century, and the deployment of tanks, chemical weapons, flamethrowers, and high-range artillery confirmed Benjamin’s belief that human life no longer resembled life in its traditional sense at all (Ancient Greek long made a useful distinction: zōḗ, meaning the simple fact of being alive; bios, meaning life as a form of living, as in the sum of one’s personality, history, relationships, systems of belief, and personal achievements. To the Greeks and practically all Western philosophy since, because human beings enjoyed the latter and animals strictly the former, humans also received special moral status). In his resplendent words, “a generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn carriage now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a forcefield of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.” Emptied of its magic, hidden behind technology, and stripped of its sacred value, human life by 1914 became something else. And there was nothing surprising about that.
New worlds break old ones. This includes the guiding structure that the past once provided.
Like Benjamin, I do not recognize the world I wander. Inertia has replaced the chimeric fantasies of my childhood. Though my youth was lonely, it was also meaningful: my disposition and the words used to describe it – sensitive, melancholic, despondent and others – gave me a place in the world. But the value of words and their descriptive powers, like our material, political, moral, and social worlds, are changing.
My eyes have been sad for as long as I can remember. But they did not have to be. If the world was different, maybe I, like many others, would not have started grieving at the age of three. That lonely boy’s utopia would have welcomed his lonely eyes instead and given them something to smile about.