SOMETHING OR OTHER:
The Crevice
BY Irena Grudzińska-Gross
Where did they come from – all these young and not so young adults who remind us of what we were not so long ago? And why is this crevice so scary
We live in a segregated world, separated into an endless number of categories, and in an individual life new boundaries continuously appear. We all remember how subjugated we felt as children, dependent on the arbitrariness of adults’ permissions. Liberated from childhood’s bondage, we erected new obligations that acted like limits on our freedom: love relations, marriages, children. These were voluntarily designed structures within which we had to burrow our little channels, powerful structures which delimited spaces that were bounded, like nation-states, by frontiers that made us who we were but also inspired our dreams of escape. And then the strictures of late youth and middle age became looser, their burdens seemed to lighten – we found the rhythm for our steps, we accumulated skills and memories. We calmed ourselves with a feeling of competency and almost-maturity. And now, unexpectedly, a new border sneaks in on us, or rather a crevice appears that separates us from all those new people who were born and grew up while we were busy living. Where did they come from – all these young and not so young adults who remind us of what we were not so long ago? And why is this crevice so scary? Perhaps because it is located not ahead of us but behind, and pushes us forward, if that is how we can describe this direction. Behind our backs a crevice and what ahead? Another boundary? Or freedom?
Irena Grudzinska Gross writes about history of literature and ideas. She teaches at Princeton University. Her latest book "Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky. Fellowship of Poets" was published by Yale University Press in 2009.
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