The Final Forward-Looking Sentence

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I was just accidentally reading a biography of an experimental filmmaker who I had not heard of until today but whose accomplishments are impressive, his company impeccable, his admirers (apparently) many.

It was also quite clear that he was writing his biography in third person.

Andrew Rudd does not fault anyone for writing in the third person while writing on the internet. It is a compositional flourish that many humans of our epoch mimic. Once there's a microphone in the room, or a reporter with a spiral wirebound reporter's notebook, a cameraphone held aloft, or the implicit possibility that even Siri may be recording one's words for an archive that lives in a vault deep below Silicon Valley -- the possibility of the public persists in the imagination of people who live such a time.

An ephemeral sense of legacy haunts the discourse of these people.  At the end of the experimental filmmaker's biography, there was a curious sentence:

"He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two sons but is about to move to Connecticut."

Ah, the irony of a forward-looking final sentence, rendered questionable by the (inevitable) passage of time, unrecorded on the internet.

Wouldn't it be a wonder if we could just click on such sentences and find out how things turned out in Connecticut? Or if the house sale even went through? Maybe they all still live in Brooklyn. Wouldn't that be the worst.

That's my Grandma Linda, second from the left, at a high school reunion in the 70's with her sister, Anita Lang(in purple).

My grandmother was a great fabulist and caption-writer in the thousands of missives that she mimeographed and circulated round the globe (to family, friends and missionaries) on a semi-weekly schedule.

In one such missive, about ten years after this picture was taken, she explained why she had been recently including hand-drawn sketches at the top of her letters.

She speculated a Grandma Moses - style third act for her own life.

I didn't know who Grandma Moses was until I read the letter much later as an adult and used the internet to fill me in on all the things that had ever happened. (Or at least one version of them.)

Grandma Moses started painting when she was in her 70's (in 1938) when Grandma Linda was in her twenties. Grandma Moses became famous for her scenes of country life in her golden years.

In this picture, My grandmother seems to be looking at the future, right? Just off camera?

What would her sentence be at this moment?

And what do all of our anticipatory speculations reflect about who we are, where we are and what we imagine next?

"He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two sons but is about to move to Connecticut."