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...