I’ve been remiss in writing up recent conferences, but I’m no longer sure that’s a bad thing. Instead of a summary that then, it seems, gets put away in my memory (here or elsewhere), I find I’m going back to things I’ve heard said, presentations made — and circling and circling. It seems to make for better thinking.
Here’s one thing I’ve been struck by, both when I saw it last month in Richard Sandford‘s geeKyoto presentation (Richard is a Learning Researcher at Futurelab; he’s blogged about geeKyoto here and his presentation is available here),
and when Matt wrote recently:
We see the world in fives: two generations back, our children, and our children's children, and ourselves. Time is a little planet with close horizons.
In his del.icio.us notes on Matt’s post, Rod excerpted and commented:
"And it's my job to carry the torch and god help me if I stumble, because I'm it now [...] and that's the burden of the middle" ... and even after kids arrive too: the burden of shepherding the generations either side on their journeys.
I don’t know for sure whether it’s true that no day goes by without my thinking of my father, who died four years ago this October, but his memory is always close and I often think of him. It certainly feels like not a day goes by without my thinking of him.
I know far too little about my grandparents’ and even, when I think about it, my parents’ lives.
And into my head comes the first part of Auden’s late poem (August, 1973), ‘The Question’. It’s short, so I’ll quote it all:
All of us believe
we were born of a virgin
(for who can imagine
his parents copulating?),
and cases are known
of pregnant Virgins.But the Question remains:
from where did Christ get
that extra chromosome?
In his almost as brief discussion of the poem, John Fuller draws in Augustine writing about his parents, over 1600 years ago, in the Confessions (IX.xiii): ‘by whose bodies thou broughtest me into this life, though how I know not’.
