As I noted in my last post, this summer's month-long tour of Ireland in the company of a gaggle of undergraduates provided me with a number of unpleasant reminders that I am no longer 25 years old. Example 2:
Traveling from one place to another, the undergrads would often play the "Would you rather" game--the one that requires you to choose between two usually disgusting or horrifying options: e.g. Would you rather eat a cup of slugs or a plateful of live cockroaches? Would you rather be hit on the head with a hammer or stabbed in the chest with a scissors? etc. etc. etc. Fairly tedious after awhile, obviously, except one afternoon when the following question came to the top of the pile: Would you rather be handsome/beautiful yet always look bad in photographs, or physically unattractive in person but nice-looking in photographs? Eavesdropping, I immediately thought, Well, duh. The first option, clearly. To my astonishment, all the students opted for the second. Image over actuality. The triumph of the virtual over the real. Photographs, they decided, would reach more people. And they would last.
The generation gap, already the size of the Grand Canyon, suddenly widened further. The cliffs on both sides crumbled and crashed; the bridges spanning the chasm slid into the deep. Peering through the dust thrown up by the collapsing canyon walls, I could just make out figures on the other side. They looked familiar, but when the air cleared, I realized that no, no, they were another species altogether.
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