Wild Strawberries

Only in honesty do we have lies. Truth is a lack of memory.

Can fact only happen once? Does memory change fact? Is it necessary to remember? Why?

Author, Milan Kundera, is obsessed with lost lessons of war in forgetting. My theory is that war becomes less about the struggle of opposing ideologies/economies/religions/whatever than it is about the conflict of generations. Memory is the cause of war. What we primarily learn from history is an appetite for what to become, what to beat and be better than. Every war is to end war, and the veterans of one war pound their chests with pride until it becomes the drumbeat of the next army.

Some of us don’t want to grow up into war. Some of us don’t want that.

I remember wild strawberries. From my childhood. Once, when I was lost, not terribly lost, I just couldn’t match up the trail I was on with the map…. I was coming down a mesa in Wyoming. It’s nothing but sagebrush. Unless you’re in a canyon, you can pretty much see where you need to go, only sometimes you can’t figure out how to get there. Like writing essays. Anyway, I was low on water and I came across these strawberries, the tiny plants only conspicuous by their bright red fruit, small but potent. They packed more flavor in dime-sized portions than you could get out of Jolly Rancher candies. They were better than Swedish meatballs anyway.

Wild Strawberries, SMULTRONSTALLET, is a film about conflict of the generations set out in black and white. In the end, it is about a gray old man—his acceptance of death and of the next generation, peaceful acceptance which brings happiness. It is one of Ingmar Bergman’s best known films.

Bergman says in an interview that "Anonymity is unthinkable," then he goes on to say how desirable it would be. The Internet is the answer to that—desirable anonymity. The Internet could be the answer to global warming also.

Bergman died a year ago. I choose to remember him today.