Our Lives In a Nutshell
BY CANSU ORANÇ (PSYC/IV)
oranc@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
Imagine that, 100 years from now, someone decides to write your biography. You might have become famous and died so, or have just been an average person throughout your life. Regardless of the reason, someone wants to write about your life. He or she wants to write about your regular thoughts, daily rituals, and casual attitudes. Which sources would she benefit from?
This question has been on my mind for days, since the day I finished a fascinating book about Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's lives. The author was a friend of de Beauvoir and a very close friend of Hélène de Beauvoir, Simone's sister, so she was an "insider." Along with her personal experiences, he or she bases her book mostly upon the two writers' written documents such as their books, newspaper articles. and above all letters. Beauvoir and Sartre were corresponding with each other whenever they were apart. During World War II, Sartre was sometimes writing to Beauvoir three letters a day. As you can imagine, there were thousands of letters from the two writers to each other and to their other loved ones, full of their feelings and thoughts. Throughout the book, it was interesting to read the two writers' daily stories in their own words.
I then thought, what would someone use to understand my daily feelings and thoughts many years from now? I have this column, a few modest short stories and embarrassing elementary school diaries. What else? What does my whole generation have to pass on to the next generation? It then hit me: Facebook status! Tweets! Text messages! You might say that they're not durable but let's skip this point for now. I don't want to sound like a technophobe since I'm not. I'm just questioning what we are really leaving behind us. Do you think next generations will be able to cipher out our text messages like "nbr aksm geliomsn mcks" or " 'sup? comin 2nite? xoxo"? I don’t text this way (i.e. no-vowels way of texting), and I hope most of you don't either. What I'm trying to say here is that in our daily lives, we're restricted in word limitations all over the place. On very different domains, we're subtly asked to use as few words as possible. 140 characters per tweet? You can't write a 500-word essay for your Facebook status. In career fairs we learn how to express ourselves briefly for 10 minute job interviews and to write encapsuled essays for our classes. In this case, how can we pass on our feelings and thoughts to future? Can all these be compared to Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre's letters? This stream began to get hold of our thoughts and feelings as well. I believe that over time, humankind learned to think and feel with as few words as possible. We're getting simpler and simpler, as the capacity of our external drives increases. What for?
When we were younger, my brother and I used to play a word association game on long car drives. He would say a word, and I would come up with the first one that came to my mind. Taking turns, our game would go on swiftly until we got tired. These days, I'm planning play this game by myself with sentences, and I want to write down every sentence that comes to my mind. I feel that I have to open my mind and pour it out on paper without any limitations. I need to think with more words and feel with more vigor. Then maybe someday, if someone decides to write my biography (although I can't see any reason for that) he or she can read those pages and know the true me.