OLD AGE AND IDENTITIES

To be able to use one’s long road through life in order to dismantle statistical truisms serves to validate Hanna Arendt’s dictum on totalitarian governments: from left to right they are all prompt to reduce human histories and diverse ways to numbers and equations. And if those coned governments’ calculations need to be purified, the ones that disprove them are eliminated, expelled, like a professor I once met, who got rid of the evidence that contradicted his thesis on whatever he was studying, but kept the thesis. Old people know they are the difference. Some of them keep quiet about it, not wanting to disturb the illusory peace. Others, like my grandmother used to say sarcastically when dismissing what she did not agree with -Sí, Pepe- and then would not say anything else. Her old age gave her the freedom to say nothing more. The long path through life also serves to show that we are not all alike; and in our collective and personal differences there are joys and pains to be shared and, perhaps, can be used to mitigate the sufferings of the others or laugh together at our commonalities and peculiarities as individuals: our old age identities.