I’m not a fan, so I didn’t get too far in the Amazing Stories ‘Voice of Fandom’ article, but I got far enough to develop a huge case of deja vu when I read:
The problems facing fandom are multi-fold, but key among them I believe are the following: our graying is not nearly as much of a problem as the fact that we are ineffective in passing our culture on.
I also follow some traditional religious blogs, and this is the theme of them all. We’re not passing our tradition on! Will your children or grandchildren be X, Y, or Z?
I’ve thought about this a little myself, as I get older. I will not be passing my traditions on, and my grandchildren will not be X, Y, or Z, because I have none. Nor has my brother. Whatever proud Bownian traditions have been erected by previous generations will end with us. But the older I get, the more I realize that there were not that many proud Bownian traditions. What I admired in my parents, and regret to see passing from the world, was not unique to them; and it may not really be passing.
There are certainly people out there living the sort of hobby-farm rural lifestyle my father enjoyed, and there are academic philosophers like my mother, and there are people who carry on mannerisms from the pre-war days — I know some of them — and there are people who knit, who can, who chop wood, who garden, who play bridge, who have cats, who read mysteries. There is probably even someone out there who still reads Chemical Abstracts.
But! But! None of them are my parents. None of them tell our family jokes, or remember our family grievances. None of them discuss chemistry in bed or put up floating docks in the middle of the pond or make sun jam or steam their Xmas puddings over a wood stove — except they do, don’t they. As soon as I move away from the mere fact of being my parents into actual things my parents did, I move out of uniqueness.
Our lives are assemblages. Other people’s lives are assemblages. There is probably no single piece of the assemblage unique to any of us except our individuality and our body and our relationships with other individuals and bodies. And this is why I think the angst over tradition is a mistake, because it’s an attempt to displace what we really want, and can never have again, onto something else that is in truth not special in any significant way. We can tinker with a tradition forever without its ever being good enough, or authentic enough, or pure enough, because it really doesn’t contain the magic ingredient at all.
I could make a fetish of my family traditions, live in the same house, wear the same clothes and eat the same food, but none of it would bring my parents back. Better to take the hundreds of things they taught me and enjoy them for their own sake. Thank heaven, none of those things are unique, or even hard to find.
