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Nov. 4, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:25
1501 Lost In History
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Hey everybody, Steph. Hope you're doing well.
This is a, you may want to listen to this, it may not, just a personal cast, and perhaps a somewhat mournful one.
It's something that's been a habit of mine, or maybe more than a habit, almost a compulsion of mine.
And I don't know if it has to do with curiosity or empathy or anything like that, but I'll tell you what it is.
If you have any thoughts about it, you can let me know.
So I ordered this book, Echoes of Armageddon, An American Search into the Lives and Deaths of Eight British Soldiers, In World War I, I'll just read you the back of it so you can sort of put this in context.
Echoes of Armageddon, 1914 to 1918, relates the gripping story of eight totally anonymous British officers and men who fought under appalling trench warfare conditions and did not survive this conflict.
Their medals have been in the author's collection for many years and are named to each recipient.
This scant information served as his starting point for attempting to recreate these soldiers' lives and the circumstances of their deaths.
This unique departure from the norm enables the reader to link with the author, as he travels through Great Britain, France, Flanders, and elsewhere in his relentless search for the facts on these fighting men's experiences.
In battle, this book also tells of certain political events and social conditions in Great Britain.
That affected these soldiers' families as well as a number of major happenings in both allied and enemy countries throughout the world that led to an estimated 11 million war dead worldwide.
The author has made every effort to provide accurate dates for each incident mentioned throughout this book by relying on the Times diary and index of the war 1914 to 1918 and now a very rare volume that lists newspaper headlines for every major event.
Over the course of this entire conflict.
And I did try getting in touch with the author, see if he would be available to interview.
B. Corey Kilvert, Jr.
I think he's probably dead.
He's pretty old in the photo from a while back.
Which is a shame, because I'd sort of like to know a little bit more about this motivation.
But the guy spent years.
He's got these eight medals in his collection, which I guess have people's names on them.
And the guy spent years and traveled thousands of miles and wrote huge numbers of emails and had a research assistant just to find out the guys who received these medals, where they were born, what happened with their lives before they went into the army, and how they died and so on.
It's really quite fascinating.
And I wasn't quite expecting the book to be...
Well, to me, it's strangely moving.
Because, I mean, there's scraps of information and dead ends.
And he gives a little bit of his sleuthing about what leads him here and there.
And, of course, people get married and their names change.
And, of course, very few people are alive who would remember any of these people, if any.
And it's... It's really quite fascinating.
I have this thing, you know, where I see, you know, old photos or old movies or whatever.
And maybe, I don't think I'm entirely alone in this, but it's a very strong impulse for me.
I see these old movies or old photos or whatever.
And I want to know every detail about, you know, who everyone is and what they were doing before this photo.
And what were they doing right after this photo?
And where did they buy their clothes?
And, I mean, it's crazy! It's, um...
I don't know. It's like the Grey Mouse in Fafrid has a story called The Curse of the Smalls and the Stars that I read many years ago.
It feels like The Curse of the Smalls.
Like, I bought a Brando film the other day, because I wanted to watch it.
And it's him standing in front of a...
Standing behind a chain-link fence.
And literally, I sit down and I think, who built that chain link fence?
Where was it built? You know, how long was it standing before this photo was taken?
I want to... I don't know, it's like I want to fall into every detail of everything.
It's a very strange kind of compulsion.
It's a bittersweet thing, and it's not upsetting or anything, but it's interesting.
I want to fall into every detail of these histories.
I was playing a song for Isabella the other day, Who Needs You by Queen, because she likes that kind of rhythm, and she's starting to learn how to dance and all that, so it's great fun to dance with her.
And I found a copy of the song on YouTube with, I guess, a gathering that the Queen lads were at.
Looks like the early 70s.
And it's, you know, they're playing some tennis and they're playing billiards and so on, right?
And, you know, how much would I give?
Not because of any star worship, it could be anything from anyone, just to be at that party and to see what it was like and who won the billiard game and who won the tennis games and what jokes were made and, you know, this need or this yearning, it's a yearning almost, to crawl into history.
And to poke around and to see, to bring it back to life, to know what was happening.
I don't know exactly where it comes from.
And again, if you have the same feelings or thoughts or have any ideas, I would really be fascinated to hear about this or whether this is just me or whether other people have that same impulse.
I think I remember the very first Saturday Night Live, George Carlin made a joke, or an observation where he said, you know, you ever see extras in old movies and wonder how many of them are still alive?
It's sort of like that, but to me it feels even stronger.
Even stronger than that.
So I'll give you some examples from this book.
All right, I'm just going past Isabella's room.
I have to be quiet, quiet, quiet.
She had a tough time going down tonight.
Actually, it's morning.
She had a tough time going down this morning.
All right, that's better.
So, you know, here's an example from this book.
Let's see if it makes any sense.
So, this is from page 20.
This guy, his name is...
Let me just get his name for you.
Arthur Small. Arthur Small. And boy, he is small.
Anyway, so Arthur's small.
And of course there's these photos, right?
And you see these people's photos.
They're standing in a doorway. Like, where was the doorway?
There's a brick wall behind them.
Who laid that brick? Where did the bricks come from?
I mean, I want to follow every single detail of a little photograph.
What happened to the boots? What happened to the shoes?
I remember reading a book on Churchill's mother's life.
And the same sort of thing.
She died and the sheets were wet with blood and so on.
And I was like, well, who took those sheets away?
Did they wash them or did they throw them out?
And what possible difference could it make to anything?
But still, I want to know.
I want to know. And it's a very strong feeling.
I've never... I don't think I've really never acted on it.
I've never sort of... I mean, this guy spent years, I guess he had the same sort of feeling and that's probably where it's...
Communicating itself, right? He had the same sort of feeling, like he wanted to know what happened to these guys, and he really, I mean, made it.
He was retired, I think, so, you know, good to have a hobby, but he made it sort of his life's work for, I don't know, years to find out all of this, to write this book and so on.
And, um...
So this guy...
Robert Small, I think it's his brother, says he was a pacifist, and he says, And then it says,
"Steadily incapacitated by exposure to poison gas and capable of only light part-time agricultural work, he deteriorated steadily and finally died in 1921, a victim not only of war, but of those who had flung so many of England's sons into it.
His mother had died several months earlier, at the age of only forty-eight.
And that to me, oh, and so, so, so, her husband was discharged in Kent, this is a woman, and his army character certificate described him as steady and well-conducted.
He had been in uniform for over three years, and at the age of 49 his black hair was beginning to turn grey.
He was 82 when he died in 1951, and was buried beside his wife in Brunchley, Kent.
Their unmarked grave sites have long since vanished beneath the turf.
And that to me is all just fascinating and sad, right?
This guy was gassed in the trenches or in the war.
And he died in 1921.
He deteriorated, so he must have been coughing up, and did he know he was going to die, and who hired him, and what kind of work did he do, and how long could he work, and where did he live, and what was his bedding like, and did he wear pajamas?
It's crazy! Again, these details, which are forever lost to history, which no man can recall.
I remember also, in a book on Ayn Rand, there was a...
A picture of, I think, Rand and maybe it was Alan Greenspan.
And there were like two other people in the picture.
Those two other people were not identified, right?
And the picture was, I think, in the 60s or maybe late 50s, 60s.
I remember this from years and years and years ago.
And I just remember thinking, well, I mean, the two people in the picture, I mean, their mothers would have recognized them, their friends would have recognized them.
Like, people would have said, oh, that's so-and-so.
I've known him for years or whatever, right?
But it can happen that everybody who knew...
Who you were is gone.
And then you're just a face in a picture that no one can recognize.
That's a... it's not...
It's not a chilling thing.
I mean, they had their lives and they had their fun and they did their thing or whatever, right?
But it is a really sobering and, to me, melancholy, though not sad or depressing, not depressive, but melancholy thought that you can just be that person, right?
You'd be that person who's in a photograph and everybody who knew who you were is gone or unavailable or dead or whatever.
And you can just be, you know, an unidentified person.
And so-and-so.
And you've got a face, you've got clothing, you've got all of this kind of stuff.
But you're just this person that nobody knows.
I'll give you another example.
So... Let's go to this page.
So this is a guy. It's not even him.
It's his brother. This is a guy.
This is from Chapter 3.
There's a guy named Armitage.
Oh, Willis. Willis, his name is.
And here's one of his brothers.
This is what they found out. John Willey served as a sergeant in France and Flanders until severely shell-shocked.
Two hundreds of hopeless neurasthenia cases, sudden noises, could set them off, sweating and sobbing, trembling, hallucinating or stammering.
They might lapse into stupors or scream uncontrollably.
His mind haunted forever by the horror of pounding artillery barrages, gas attacks, and hideous sights on the battlefield, John Willey was eventually committed to Middlewood Hospital in Sheffield, where he died in 1972 at the age of 83.
And there's another one here. Ernest Armatage, 20, in 1914 went into the army, but no one in his family could recall which regiment he served with.
Captured by the Germans, he was ill-treated as a prisoner of war, and in later years was able to work only occasionally.
Little Remains of Albert's World.
This is the guy whose medal he has.
Little Remains of Albert's World, the author writes.
The district of Sheffield he knew as a child was destroyed by German bombs in World War II, and the church in which he was married was demolished in the early 1980s.
His notes from the East remain, of course, as do a few photographs, and a curved Burmese sheath knife, a bronze memorial plaque with his name on it, and three service medals he never lived to wear or survive as well.
Private Albert Armitage is commemorated on panel four of the Plucksturt Memorial to the Missing in Belgium at the York Corner Extension.
There, two stone lions got the honor of 11,447 British soldiers, who, like Albert, disappeared without a trace.
Because, of course, when the author looks into the history of these people, he will often find that nobody knows what happened to them.
Upwards of two million people, they just never, they never found them.
They just vanished, right?
In an atomizing blast of shells or maybe swallowed under the mud or buried under the falling mud from a shell explosion or something like that.
They just vanished. And you may have heard of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
The idea behind that was that there were just so many people in the First World War who vanished without a trace that people just really didn't have any closure.
There was no place where they could go and visit the graves of those they'd lost and so on.
And I do believe that in my own family, it was four of the male children in my own family were killed.
I write a little bit about this in my novel, almost.
and they just dug up one guy.
They dug up a bunch of people.
They took a, if I remember rightly, it's been a long time since I've read this, but they dug up one body in Flanders or somewhere after the war, and they took up, sorry, they dug up a bunch of bodies.
They took them to a hospital, and some guy, I think he was royalty, just picked one of them out, and they then just took this one body.
They didn't know who the hell it was.
but they didn't know who it was, and they took him to Westminster Abbey, I think.
And there was a procession which, you know, thousands and thousands of people came and, you know, tens of thousands of people that day or that week went to pay their respects because the bodies were just never recovered.
I mean, even now they're still plowing up in France, bodies from the First World, bones from the First World War, and even shells and so on.
And, you know, none of these people can be identified.
They're just... Lost to the atomic vile destructiveness of history.
And I just...
When I read about this guy who ended up in this mental hospital because he had shell shock, right?
Shell shock was a very interesting and chilling phenomenon, right?
I mean, basically people had nervous breakdowns or collapsed mentally under the strain of battle.
And... It was not a lack of courage.
These were often people who'd been well-decorated, who had, you know, shown extraordinary, if not suicidal courage, on the battlefield.
And they simply would shake uncontrollably, scream, they had nightmares, they were not fit for combat, they dissolved into sobs, they, you know, they had, their minds had been traumatized to the point where, I guess what now would probably be called post-traumatic stress disorder.
That was what had occurred to them, but of course nobody really had any knowledge of this at the time.
They didn't really understand it, they didn't know anything really about it.
But what it did do, this post-traumatic stress disorder, this shell shark, Because the army had, and this guy says hundreds, but I believe it was tens of thousands of people, the world over had this problem of shell shock.
It actually gave impetus or rise to two thinkers whose work had remained relatively obscure.
Prior to the First World War.
The first was Nietzsche and the second was Freud.
Now, of course, Nietzsche was given prominence again because of his accuracy in predicting the suicidality of the First World War, but the army had this big problem in that it couldn't figure out why these brave people had these mental collapses.
And it was called Shell Shock because the sort of theory, such as it was at the time, was that the explosions in the air of the shells had created an air wave that had damaged the internals.
The brain, right? It had not caused any head wounds.
Of course, the British wore cloth caps, crazily enough, for the first bit of the war.
That's how, you know, General Thor was fighting the last war and all.
But there were no physical wounds for these people, but the idea was that somehow the airwave, the pressure of the airwave moving at such high velocity from a shell explosion, did not create...
A head wound, right?
It did not cause concussions or physical wounds to the head, but it jostled the brain in its, you know, quasi-amniotic sac, and the brain had become bruised and malfunctioning, and so that's what it was called shell shock.
Now we understand that it's to do with post-traumatic stress disorder, but at the time it was just considered to be a brain injury.
That came from bursting shells that had no, that left no physical evidence.
That's the best that they could come up with.
But that didn't really work very well.
I think also because some people had post-traumatic stress disorder who weren't even near shells, right?
So people who would be in the medical arena, right?
The MASH unit, so to speak.
We called that back then, I don't think.
The people who ran the mobile hospitals began to develop shell shock after seeing just this, I mean, staggering amount of damage done to people, and of course, they were to a large degree helpless back then to save people.
They just would amputate, and Bertolt Brecht talks about that, and just basically lopping off people's limbs, and just they would tonicate the wounds and hope like hell that they would survive, or I guess vaguely cross their fingers or whatever.
And there was so little that they could do for the wounded back then, compared to now, right?
Now we have many more problems with war casualties, because the medicine has improved to the point where people who would have died, you know, even 10 or 20 years ago, now survive, and that, of course, is good in a way, and not good in a way as well, right?
In terms of cost and resources and so on.
So, I think of this guy who had this shell shock, right?
And he was in hospital, you know, for decades.
And it's, you know, what did he see?
What caused him to have this level of reaction or trauma?
I mean, was it an accumulation of things that occurred?
Was it a single traumatic incident?
What was it that caused this terrible happening?
And also, was there any chance that he could have been cured if he had had access to To proper mental health regimens earlier in his life, right?
You know, who was his doctor, right?
He died at the age of 83, right?
So let's say that he was committed in 1920, right?
Maybe 1920, maybe 1925.
I mean, that's like 50 years he spent in a mental hospital.
What kind of treatment did he receive?
Who was his doctor? Did they ever try to do any kind of post-PTSD counseling or stress management?
Was his brain irritated? Did they just medicate him?
It's bizarre. Part of me, again, I would never do this because I recognize that it's not an objective thing that I'm talking about here.
Part of me were like, is there any way I can get his records?
Well, you know, I died in the early 70s, right?
What is that, 30 years ago, almost?
No more, 35, almost 40 years ago.
His records are probably destroyed, or they'd be in some place where, you know, nobody knows where they are, and what would the records be of his 50 years or 40 years in a mental hospital?
Yeah, I want to know what happened.
And also, was there at some point, right?
Because you sort of think about this, right?
Some guys in it... Mental hospital.
Let's say he's in for 10 years, right?
And then at some point, you know, maybe he's not getting any better.
Maybe people are just, you know, giving him, you know, heavy medication or restraining him, or is he locked in a cell for a long time because he abuses himself or whatever?
Was he given any kind of therapy?
And then at some point...
I don't know when this would be, but at some point, did someone say, ah, okay, well, there are new treatments or new cures out now, or new approaches to these kinds of things?
Because there were, right? I mean, you could get better treatments for this kind of stuff as time went along.
But did his doctor say, Well, the guy's been in the loony bin for 20 years, right?
What's the point of curing him now, right?
You know, he came in in 1920.
It's now 1940.
We're not going to cure him because there's another war on.
But even that, right? Let's say he went in in 1935, right before the war started, or even any intimation the war was going to happen.
Do they say, well...
The guy's been in the mental hospital for, uh...
Fifteen years. So let's say that we are able to cure him to some degree.
If we really, really work hard at it, well, what does that mean?
I mean, is he going to go out and reintegrate into society, having spent fifteen years?
It's something that Oliver Sacks talks about as well.
I mean, he has a guy, I think it's the man who mistook his wife for a hat or something like that, and he talks about a guy who's got these memory problems and thinks that he's like twenty or whatever, twenty-five, when he's in fact in his fifties, and he holds up a mirror to this guy This guy panics and freaks out because he doesn't recognize that he's older, but then, a few minutes later, he's forgotten about it, right?
So it's in a sense, do we want to traumatize this guy with curing him so that he'll recognize everything that he lost in the war, the 15 years of craziness that he went through, right, if there's even any way to cure him?
At some point, did they just say, you know what, this is where this guy is going to live out his days?
You know, without a marriage, without children, without a job, without education, probably without friends.
I don't know. Maybe he had friends in the loony bin.
I don't know. I mean, nobody will ever know.
Probably this information has, you know, sifted into history, like dinosaur bones slowly sinking into sand or tar or water.
This information just vanishes.
Did somebody say? Or was it a status kind of thing, right?
Like, did the mental hospital get state funding based upon the number of patients?
In which case, was their incentive to cure, from an economic standpoint, that much less, right?
So was this guy just a cash cow for them, right?
Well, why would we want a cure?
We're getting X amount of dollars per month because this guy's here and he's still here, right?
There are guys in the First World War who were so badly damaged by gas, they had to remain on respirators in hospitals for decades, right?
I mean, what was their life like?
I mean, did they adjust?
Did they... I just...
I have this...
I don't know, this mournful desire to just go back and find out just about everything about things which can't matter.
I mean, it wouldn't matter to anyone now.
But then I say, well, does it matter, right?
I mean, this guy wrote a book on all these dead guys, right?
And if I had a bunch of medals, I would have...
I mean, I don't think I ever would, but if I did have a bunch of medals...
You know, I'd probably finger them from time to time and say, gee, I'd love to know exactly what happened to these guys.
And this guy, the guy who wrote this book, well, that's what he did, right?
He went and followed all of these guys' histories and got as much as he could and visited and wrote letters and so on.
And it meant something to me that he did it.
I find it quite moving that he did it.
And of course, every question he answers is another question that can be asked.
And I don't feel this about things that are...
That I can find out about easily.
It's always about the things that are masked or hidden or, you know, for which answers can almost never be achieved, right?
I mean, I thought about this in terms of my own life, right?
So when my mom was institutionalized, this would be...
Gosh, let me work it out.
81. I guess 81 or 82 she was institutionalized.
Gosh, I'd love to know what...
what was written...
I mean, I would really like to know what was written down by the psychiatrists and what treatment was she given and so on.
What happened, right?
I mean, to some degree also because I'd like to know how they managed to not...
I would like to know these things, and I never will.
I never will. I don't think I can legally, but even if I could, I mean, that's just the kind of thing that, you know, takes a long time, and so on.
I did this once before. I tried to figure out something to do with my family finances, and I got a bunch of bank records and so on.
Because it seemed like we, at one point, were making some money, but there never seemed to be any money.
I just couldn't figure it out. So I got a bunch of bank records and tried to look it up, but couldn't really get...
I mean, I just saw huge numbers of withdrawals, but I couldn't tell who it was or what it was for, and nobody would answer any questions.
So I sort of gave up on that.
But it really is, for me, centered or focused around things which I will never know.
I can't figure out, can't...
Mysteries that cannot be penetrated.
And I don't know. I don't know why I have this feeling or thought or desire.
I mean, it probably has something to do with why I got into history.
It may have also something to do with, I mean, one of the reasons I got into history was that when I did historical plays, which I did a lot of at theater school, when I did these historical plays, um...
I really did enjoy doing the research into the historical times to figure out how to be accurate and what sort of world these people were living in at the time.
And it was in that kind of research that...
When I left theatre school, I may be interested in pursuing history as a discipline.
And this, of course, has something to do with it as well, right?
This... And, I mean, I think in some ways it has to do with my own personal history in ways that I can't quite fathom yet.
I mean, this is a sort of big old thing that I've wanted to know about for...
I've had this sort of impulse as long as I can remember to dig into things which really can never be learned, in a way.
I think it has something to do with my own life.
And I think...
That I've not wanted to be that guy in the photo that is like an unidentified guy.
You know, I think that I've not wanted to be that, right?
I mean, you see a picture of Nietzsche or whoever, right?
And you say, oh, that's Nietzsche.
That's quite the star she's got going on there, right?
And that's Nietzsche for sure, right?
And I think there's never like a picture of Nietzsche and a friend of Nietzsche's where they say...
A friend of X and X, right?
It's always Nietzsche and guy.
It doesn't really matter whether it's Nietzsche or someone else, but I think I've always wanted to not be that unknown soldier, so to speak, that guy who comes and lives and dies and that's it.
I mean, I've got a friend who...
I mean, you knew he was never going to have kids.
And he's the only son.
And that's it for the family line, right?
I mean, it all just dies.
And his mom never did anything particular with her life.
She was a part-time bookkeeper.
And, you know, he has never done anything particular with his life.
Like a junior programmer and so on.
And... That's all just a vanishing point, right?
And I think that...
And I don't know if it's because I feel that I have something to offer and therefore I need to think about doing something that's more public or more visible.
Or whether, in a sense, I have something to offer because I have a yearning to be remembered.
Not to be admired.
Just to be remembered after I'm gone.
I think that's important.
And I don't think I've ever really been satisfied with...
With being remembered by someone, right?
I mean, I'll have a wonderful, wonderful marriage with my wife, and we're going to get old together, and we're going to die, and then...
Nobody will remember the marriage, right?
I mean, I guess Isabella will remember the marriage.
Then Isabella will get old, and she will die.
And the memory of the marriage will be gone, and there will be some secondhand things passed on, or the memory of who I was as a human being will be gone.
Right, so when it's only people that remember you, Then the memory of you is going to vanish, you know, just in the way that it was impossible to find out in many cases what really happened to these people in the First World War and who they were, what they were like. There's a couple of lines, oh, he's industrious or whatever, maybe in the Army Report or whatever, but, I mean, who even knows if that's true, right?
I mean, that could just be, that's what we say about people we don't know, so their relatives feel a little better.
It's just who these people were is not...
Not recalled. It just vanishes.
I think it's important to write down what you think and you experience, or record it in some way, so that people can remember it.
First hand, right? Remember things from your perspective, not just what other people might say about you.
I've been reading Homage to Catalonia, which is George Orwell's description of his time in...
Spain, fighting against the fascists.
And that's, you know, his own first-hand experience of what things were actually like for him.
He's also got a story, not really a story, but a depiction of the time when, I think he was in India, and a bull went rogue, and he ended up shooting the bull.
And You know, he comes across, when the bull first goes rogue, he's sort of called out from, I think, from his sleep or wherever he is.
And he goes to the marketplace, and he comes across a guy who's been trampled into the mud.
And it's died, and trampled into the mud by, you know, his skin's been pulled off by the elephant's stampede or whatever, and...
You know, part of me is like, well, what was that guy's name?
Where was he born? What was he like?
Did he have kids who mourned him?
What was his funeral like? What did they serve?
You know, it's just that kind of stuff.
You'll never know. You'll never know.
And I think, you know, the thought is just coming to me, you know, as a sort of initial thought.
It's either largely right or completely wrong, but tell me what you think.
I think... That this probably has a large amount to do with the mystery of my own early life.
So when I think of what happened to me in my early life, before two or three years old, or 18 months, I can't remember exactly the first things that I can remember, but...
When I think back about my own life, there's an impenetrable fog at the sort of very base and root of my memory, which goes back to a time that was enormously formative to me, which is sort of birth to two years or whatever, which of course I can't remember, and I can't get any facts about it.
I'd love to know more facts about my early life, because, you know, it's a great mystery about why I ended up so fundamentally different from everyone else in my family.
Why, why, why, why?
And not just fundamentally different from everyone in my family, but, you know, fundamentally different from most people.
In the present, though I don't believe in the future.
Because that's where we live.
That's where our judgment of ourselves lives.
It's not in the present, but in the future.
I'll do a podcast on that soon, right?
And I mean, I have some theories, right?
That I had a nanny, a woman I stayed with when my mother was depressed and in hospital for a couple of months after I was born.
Who I believe was very affectionate.
And I think that that level of affection when I was very young for the first, you know, couple of months of my life, it probably had a lot to do with developing, I think, the empathy that I have and the compassion and so on.
My brother, who was born in Africa, South Africa, and he had a woman who was black, right?
A black woman was his nanny, and at least judging from the pictures that I've seen of her, she looked pretty depressed, as you can imagine, right?
A black woman working for white people in Africa in the 1960s, you know, probably not an overly happy person, right?
An uneducated Primitive, no prospects, no hope.
And, you know, living in a racist, apartheid world where her opportunities as a woman, as a human being, are, you know, crushingly limited.
And that probably did not lead to an enormous amount of happiness or an enormous amount of gentleness.
And so was it, you know, was the difference simply the caregivers that we had?
Is that what makes the difference?
I'll never know. I do know that the woman who took care of me later named her son after me, or after me, whatever I mean.
And so I judge from that, that she had a real connection and some real affection for me.
And I've talked about this before. And so maybe when I sort of think about, you know, the details of lives that I will never ever be able to uncover.
I mean, could I write to this woman?
Could I find out? Well, not really, because I'm going to get back in touch with my family to do that, and be sort of a mess, and I don't know her name, and all that kind of stuff, right?
And she may be dead, probably is now, actually.
She was not young when I was there, right?
So all of that is just lost to history, right?
It's like Stefan Molyneux. And mystery caregiver.
There's an ex. Not even a person in the picture, just an ex.
And then, you know, then the question is, well, why was this woman, if she was, if this is the answer, or at least a sort of key part of the answer as to why I am the way I am, why was this woman so gentle and affectionate, right?
And it was not the case with my other relatives, who I do have memories of.
They were, you know, all pretty, you know, not abusive, but, you know, pretty brusque and cold and not, you know, not cuddly and affectionate in a way that I understand this.
This nanny was.
And I write about this nanny in almost as well, a book which I will eventually get around to doing something with.
But why was she so different, right?
Again, to me, it comes back down to someone at some point and at some time simply has to make the decision.
To be kind and gentle with the children, and that changes things in a very fundamental way.
And I don't know what causes that or what brings that about.
I think it's just a choice.
It's just a choice where you say, I want to have the gentleness and happiness that comes from being affectionate and loving and strong and brave and courageous and virtuous.
And I just want that. I'm not going to put it off.
You know, it's like if you're overweight, right?
At some point, you're going to say, I just don't want to be a fat dude anymore or a fat...
Fat girl anymore. I just, I want the happiness that comes from, the longevity and the health benefits.
And you just, that's what you do.
You just do that, right?
Just lose the weight or whatever. And I know that's a big, complicated thing, but at some point, you just say, I'm not going to do this dysfunctional stuff anymore.
I'm just not going to. I deserve better.
I want better. I'm going to get better.
And You know, I mean, I know that there's choice and all that in the world, but a lot of who I am is the tip of an iceberg of many generations of decisions that culminated in, you know, if this is the answer, I think it is,
I don't know for sure, but if this is the answer that culminated in this gentle, kind nanny who was, you know, great with me and may have given me the physical brain development to retain the empathy that I believe that I have retained...
But who knows? Who knows where all of this came from?
It is, in a sense, a history of who I am.
And, I mean, this is partly, you know, I want Isabella to know where she came from and the choices that were made that, you know, have or had such a strong effect on her.
And I guess, you know, partly this show is, to whatever degree she'll be interested in in the future, I don't know, but this show is kind of that.
It's a sort of hymn so that she knows where she came from and the decisions that were made that affected her parenting, which affected her.
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