Shakespeare is supposed to have had ‘small Latin and less Greek.’ I, obviously not at all like Shakespeare, have the reverse, so that when a friend sent me the saying Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, I had to look it up. Times are changed and we are changed with them.
Certainly times have changed, and perhaps I notice this development in Australia more, because I am here so infrequently. One area of great change I notice is that of dress. I’m not sure how many people realise that dress is a code, but when I was young, dress was meant to convey respectability. My grandmothers always wore their hats and gloves to town, and most professional men wore suits and hats, with an occasional venture into tweed sports jackets for casual occasions. For girls and women an out-of-place bra strap meant social death, while signals were given for a wayward petticoat: It’s snowing down south. These days girls wear as an outer layer what we would have considered underwear.
But perhaps times ebb and flow in the same way as skirts have gone up and down throughout history: take beards, for example. After the Victorian era, beards returned in the 1960s, went out again, and are now back in a bewildering variety of shapes and thicknesses. I recently saw a young man with a waxed moustache exactly like the one my grandfather wore at his 1910 wedding, while a couple of days later I saw a moustache dyed a bright greeny-yellow. As for hair: show me the girl who puts her hair in rollers at bedtime, and the boy who favours the short back-and-sides of yesteryear? I suppose such practices could return, but it seems unlikely.
Of course there are many other changes. As one friend remarked after a trip to the pictures the implicit has become explicit. And how, at least in some cases. Modes of behaviour have also changed: people are louder, for example, whereas my mother used regularly to quote the reference to Cordelia in King Lear. Her voice was ever soft, gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman. My mother also had a thing about what she termed sloppy speech, while today nobody seems to care very much about how they sound. Or about their grammar. Women have become more assertive: well, that needed to happen.
I suppose people do change as the times change, although I also think most people believe they have a core self that remains much the same, despite the effects of age such as increasing irascibility and impatience. I was always fairly cautious by nature and still am: I never believed I was bullet-proof, and am rather surprised that I have lived as long as I have.
But I think I pay rather more attention to the natural world now, whereas once I tended to take it for granted, as young people do. I also pay more attention to the political world, and this tendency has naturally had the consequence of making me much more pessimistic than I was, for it is increasingly difficult to ward off despair in the face of so much power play, greed, pain and destruction, and when we see, all about us, the wicked prospering.
'Hilary Mantel once said that we look forward to technology, while the people of the past looked backwards to virtue.'
I hope I’m more tolerant: another thing that needed to happen after a rather priggish, Puritanical youth. I certainly care less about what people think and how I look. But the defining fact of my life has to be my long-ago migration to Greece, in which place and society I was forced to learn and to change in a process that probably has not stopped. I had to adapt, but the world I entered did not want to adapt to me (why should it?) and was not readily going to accept the stranger in its midst. I eventually had to accept that my pioneering background was very different from the peasant one. Australians were used to making things up as they went along, and traditional Greeks were committed to repeating an age-old pattern. I learned that later is not necessarily better, and that I could not necessarily assume anything about customs, ethics, values, tastes and ways of doing things. Genius Hilary Mantel once said that we look forward to technology, while the people of the past looked backwards to virtue. So times are definitely changed.
Mantel also said that much of her writing consisted of messages from the people she used to be. I know what she meant.
Gillian Bouras is an expatriate Australian writer who has written several books, stories and articles, many of them dealing with her experiences as an Australian woman in Greece.
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