Passing modernity

New old thoughts amended by quarantine

"It's time for you to know, I am also a contemporary ..."

Osip Mandelstam

When my son was 20, and I was about 50, respectively, he somehow noticed me (it was a half-question): “Probably, at 20 and at 50, the world seems to be approximately the same?” “Well, no,” I said. “When you are 20, it is difficult to imagine Pushkin as a contemporary, and he lived just three more times ago, as much as I am now.” And now two times more so much - this is almost here, around the corner.

Somewhere I read (I can’t refer) that the concept of “modern” was the first to use as a noun Charles Baudler (died at 46 in 1867-also around the corner). Prior to this, in French there was only the adjective “Moderne” and the noun “Modernité”, that is, “Modernity”.

But in French there is also “Contemporanéité” - but in Russian there is no such difference between “contemporaries” and “modernity”.

I am unreasonable, I feel acutely, sometimes with annoyance for misunderstanding, but still not as any inferiority. “Each era has its own forests” (B. Okudzhava). The question is who will now better extract a quarantine lesson, how much this challenge and life after it are better comprehended from one or another position. Where the “modernity” will move and who will be more “contemporary” in it.

I climbed on the shelves (I still prefer paper books), I found Sigmont Bauman: "The flowing modernity." The master of allegory in philosophy and sociology, Bauman likened to modernize the gloss rushing forward (which corresponds to the concept of progress), while the “fluid”, the free mobility of individuals of atoms is characterized by postmodern. It seems to be the possibility of a choice, but no one understands what to choose, family institutions (civil marriage), careers are scattered (freelancers change “projects” over and over again and retreat), even the state (transnational corporations) and the Fatherland (where work, there is a house, and a single language is English).

The values ​​are relative, that is, they are no longer valuables at all, and although all the subjects of this “turnover” are obsessed with Mania to change everything and find out something new for themselves, it is adjacent to the deeply snobbling conviction that there can no longer be new in the world, and “you” “We” can no longer surprise us.

And here once! - And coronavirus: a new serfdom with electronic surveillance. We are sitting at home, we think, but this is if we can. And then it turns out that we learned to retrain, but we don’t know how to think, because the thought only seems light and fast, but in fact it is long and heavy, and it cannot be changed in it arbitrarily, otherwise it spins idle. And here, oddly enough, a person of the last century receives some advantage-he is a more slow and renunciation.

And I like it in quarantine: it turns out, and not necessarily all the time to be somewhere physically. And I like my wife more and more, both the work, and the newspaper, and the house, about which I honestly thought that I did not have it.

Maybe I am more modern than young contemporaries in the modernity that we will fall into. Will life change "after quarantine"? I think yes: mentality will change, and this is “life”. A certain number of us will be appreciated by a slowdown lesson, pauses, which allows us to withstand the “digital future” in the form of the sweeping value of the flow, which it has yet been presented.

Why is a contemporary Pushkin, but not Zinaida Hippius, and even more so not Eduard Assades? The more modern Strauss and, moreover, concerts for the Police Day (ah, yes - police)? “Are there any values ​​unshakable rock over the boring mistakes of the centuries ...”, AU? (This is again to Mandelstam). Of course, they are subjective in the sense that they leave scope for choice, but not “relative”. The so -called "success" is relative. And the modernity “after” will become that everyone will take with him there (but something will leave as unnecessary).