LANGUAGE AND SENILITY

 LANGUAGE AND SENILITY

    Past fifty, a forgotten word feels like Alzheimer's knocking at the door. Names slip, words hide, and we panic: is senility beginning?
    Alzheimer's frightens many more than cancer. Every day we hear of someone—friend, acquaintance, relative—slowly erased before our eyes. So when a word refuses to come, our hands grow clammy and dread takes over.
    The other day I tried to recall a word from the opening of Kafka’s The Trial. I remembered a translation that used a sharper verb than “telling lies.” For twenty minutes on the bus, I tortured my brain. At home I checked: the word was traduce. Anxiety flooded in. Was this decline?
    As if to mock me, I was then asked for the English of salpicadero. Nothing. Minutes later dashboard popped up, thumbing its nose.
    We all fear forgetting. Tombstones promise remembrance because memory defines us—we are memory. In Homer’s Odyssey, the lotus-eaters live in blissful forgetfulness. We reject that happiness and call it a curse, hence our terror of Alzheimer's. Yet forgetting is human.
    We cannot live in fear. If the illness ever comes, we will know. Forgetting words, by contrast, is normal. We blanked out in exams, stumbled before teachers, paused while writing, searching for the elusive perfect word.
    We have always forgotten. Only now do we tremble at it. The brain is not a hard disk; a missing word is not a disaster. It has happened all your life.
    Keep the mind active. Read, think, learn—let language keep Alzheimer's at bay.
    And whatever you do, never taste the lotus fruit, sweet though it may be—even if Cupid himself offers it.

---