Creative Senior Moments
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About this ebook
Old women don't always think of their lost loves, sometimes they think about politics. texting or the latest fad. Here are a number of things that I did not know when I was young.
Topics range from bad people,business and friendship to human rights, narcissism and sex.
Claude Lambert
Claude Lambert is born in Belgium, worked in France as a geochemist and retired in the United States to be close to the American part of her family . She published in French a novel and a series of children stories. She also co-authored a political book illustrated by Virginia Haggard-Leirens, the author of "My life with Chagall." Her recent books in English are distributed by Ingram and can be found easily on Amazon or Barnes & Noble. "On Pets and Men" are humorous very short stories. "Vague Souvenir" is a World War 2 fiction. "Crimes of the Balance Sheet" is a mystery book.
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Creative Senior Moments - Claude Lambert
Claude Lambert
Creative Senior Moments
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die.
George Bernard Shaw
Creative Senior moments
by Claude Lambert
Copyright © 2012 Claude Lambert
All Rights Reserved
Smashwords Edition
ISBN: 978-0-9836791-9-6
This file is licensed for private individual entertainment only. The book contained herein constitutes a copyrighted work and may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into an information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electrical, mechanical, photographic, audio recording, or otherwise) for any reason (excepting the uses permitted to the licensee by copyright law under terms of fair use) without the specific written permission of the author.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Idiots
Languages
Truth
Loneliness
Friends
Equality
Narcissism
Denial
Brain
Survival Skills
Social Behavior
Human Rights
Torture
Looting
Dallas
Politicians
Democracy
Stability
Corruption
History
Laziness
Attila Returns
Bad People
Humiliation
Jails
Punishment
Money
Cultural Literacy
Obesity
Sex
Inventions
Plumbing
Nixon
Business
Lent
Terrorism
Health Care
Marriage
Economy
Laugh
Introduction
I am very fond of the biography of great achievers in any field, but my life is not remarkable, and although I am proud of it, I don’t think that the story of my life is interesting to anybody else. What I learned, however, what any old woman learns through life, is food for thought, delightful or stodgy. These are some of the things I did not know when I was twenty. I didn’t think that I knew everything, but was convinced I had good principles. Then, I fell flat on my face.
Aging thoughts of course are like aging cheese. You got to know when to start eating.
Keywords (cross-referenced topics in alphabetic order)
Attila Returns, Bad People, Brain, Business, Corruption, Cultural Literacy, Dallas, Democracy, Denial, Economy, Equality, Friends, Health Care, History, Human Rights, Humiliation, Idiots, Inventions, Jails, Laugh, Languages, Laziness, Lent, Loneliness, Looting, Marriage, Money, Narcissism, Nixon, Obesity, Plumbing, Politicians, Punishment, Sex, Social Behavior, Stability, Survival Skills, Terrorism, Torture, Truth.
Idiots
The World Is Full Of Idiots
I wish somebody had told me this when I was twenty years old: the world is full of idiots. It would have changed my life, I would have been happier, more efficient, and it would have spared me considerable pain. I would have given up being stressed out and trying in vain to treat this case by case, as if decency obliged me to correct such accidents of nature. Once you know this for a fact, you can choose to ignore that it is a problem or you can try to solve it. The worst thing you can do is what I did all my life: treat each case you meet as an accident.
Languages
I am born in Belgium, a very small country surrounded by four strong cultures: Dutch, German, English and French. The difficulty for us is not to learn languages, it is to find our own identity. My father insisted that I learned to read books in any European language. He thought it was basic.
Later, I learned enough Hebrew to read the Bible. Once I learned Latin and Greek, and as Dutch was mandatory in school, it was rather easy for me to access reading in many European languages, though Hungarian is a real pain, because it is entirely different and has no link to the others. My father gave me a Hungarian dictionary together with a translation of Cyrano de Bergerac, my favorite play as a teenager. It is a good thing I knew the French original by heart.
My mother had an interest in the many vernacular languages of France. Her father spoke French and Corsican, her mother French and Walloon. Her parents were born in the 1880s, when most Europeans still spoke two languages: their own dialect and the official language of their country. Half of the world still is raised in two languages, probably for the same political reasons.
I have a very bad connection between hearing a sound and reproducing it, so I do not sing, and I do not speak any language at all.
Why was it important for my parents? I think it stemmed from them being anti-fascists. Let me explain this. They opposed the ideology of European Nazism to the birth of Democracy in Greece. Learning Greek and Latin was getting access to dreams of beauty, democracy, free speech, hope for humanity. I never heard them speak of the sad realities of life in ancient Greece, such as slavery and the poor condition of women. It was all idealized, because it was the reverse of the obscurantism they suffered from, fascism. As a result, they prevented me to go into the mathematics section I yearned for, because math studies did not allow a sufficient formation in antique languages. My parents often spoke in Latin to each other or exchanged quotes.
What did I learn from this?
1. Learning languages is no big deal in a family who thinks it is natural and ethical.
In most countries, there is a political will to unite under one language. Where that will is strong, the vernacular dialects disappear. Although dialects may disappear quickly, resentment may last centuries.
2. As technological progress is limited to a few countries, a lot of languages cannot keep up. Scientific Irish, to give one example, is very irritating to read, because the creation of new words comes from a few scholars. It does not come from the heart. French, despite a few successes like ordinateur for computer is even worse, because new words come from a committee.
3. The death of languages follows the same rules as species extinction: no space, no food, no respect, no future.
4. Reading is natural in a family that reads.
5. Thinking in different languages makes you somewhat schizophrenic, because it is impossible to think exactly the same way in a different language: each language is the expression of a culture, and you cannot get rid of the cultural context. I thought it came from some defect of my