Even an obituary for Hawking in Nature by longtime colleague Martin Rees referred to “the androidal accent that became his trademark” and also speculated that Hawking’s field of cosmology was part of what made his life story resonate with a worldwide public—that “the concept of an imprisoned mind roaming the cosmos grabbed people’s imagination.” Even if only figuratively, Hawking was one of the world’s most famous living cyborgs, moving and speaking by electromechanical means because his flesh-and-blood body could not.
Some clichés are like planets, their gravitational pull too strong for all but the most propulsive acts of creativity. Middle age is one of these. The changes often associated with being in your 40s and 50s – gray hairs, career doldrums, time’s squeaky-wheeled chariot drawing near – can seem as inevitable as aging itself.
And yet, as my research on the construction and representation of aging has shown, the middle years aren’t what they used to be, nor what they will one day become.
These photographs and videos won’t last. They won’t last for the same reason that there are no lasting images of recent hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes: even with high demand for such images, there is consistent oversupply. But these images are fugitive for another reason—their function has changed. They bring us news of devastation, quick news that will soon be supplanted by other news. They are victims of an unremitting public need for novelty. The meanings of these images—which speak variously of environmental collapse, policy failure, ineluctable helplessness—do not invite their use as objects of contemplation. You don’t put photographs of the Lahaina blaze or the Camp Fire on the walls of your home. Our ways of seeing are not yet adequate to our predicament.
In the 1960s, Dr. Jack Geiger and a group of health professionals started a community health center in the Mississippi Delta, where children were dying from infectious diarrhea and malnutrition. Geiger and company began writing prescriptions for healthy food — patients would buy the prescribed food at a grocery store that would charge the clinic for the cost. When Geiger caught flack for prescribing food instead of drugs, he replied, “The last time I looked at my textbooks, the most specific therapy for malnutrition was food.”