Peripheral Visions

the old elite, whether the actual continuity was in a pattern of corruption or a pattern of paranoia about the powerful—or both. The names of streets have changed, the women are veiled, the cabarets are gone, but at a deeper level I suspect that much is the same. The Islamic revolutionaries were seeking continuities with Iran’s religious past and, at another level, reasserting an ancient longing for authenticity that recurs through Iranian history. But there is also a recurrence of familiar and unlovely ideas about power and the corrupting nature of social life.
    In all learning, one is changed, becoming someone slightly—or profoundly—different; but learning is welcome when it affirms a continuing sense of self. What is learned then becomes a part of that system of self-definition that filters all future perceptions and possibilities of learning. It is only from a sense of continuing truths that we can draw the courage for change, even for the constant, day-to-day changes of growth and aging.
    When Vanni was reaching her teens, already committed to a career in acting, she said one day, “Mommy, it must be awfully hard on you and Daddy that I don’t want to do any of the same things you and Daddy do, or Grandma and Grand-dad.” Well, how could I know whether the sense of continuity was critical at that moment or the sense of rebellion? Somehow both must be present. I crossed my fingers and said, “You can’t be a good actress unless you’re an observer of human behavior and unless you wonder about other people’s motivations. Actually, what we do has a lot in common.” I was lucky, since apparently what I said then was useful in setting up a relationship between continuity and change that fit her needs. American families have traditionally felt they were combining continuity and change when the sons of garage mechanics have become engineers and their sons have become physicists, but they might as easily have felt alienation across the differences in income and education.
    In Israel I had repeated conversations with older members of kibbutzim bewailing the fact that their children do not want to “follow in their footsteps,” choosing to leave the kibbutz, even to live abroad. “Did you grow up on a kibbutz?” I would ask. “Oh, no, my father was a shopkeeper in the city and very religious.” The parents had left home to found the kibbutz, and now the children are following in their footsteps by leaving. Any social innovation, like the cooperative living of the kibbutz, is vulnerable to the fact that the next generation may be more interested in emulating the novelty of innovation than in continuing the parents’ particular solutions. The pioneers of Israeli kibbutzim wanted to go back to the soil and to productive labor, but they tried to retain many aspects of urban life in their attitudes toward ideas and toward the arts, reading, questioning, and debating political ideals. If the kibbutz movement ever does fully settle into a pattern of biological recruitment—of one generation replacing the next—these older stylistic continuities may fade into country ways.
    Several years ago I was invited to speak at a national conference of midlife members of a teaching order of nuns. They all belonged to the age cohort that had entered the order shortly before aggiornamento in the Catholic Church: when they entered, they came to live in large, routinized convents, eating and sleeping and praying on a strict schedule. They wore old-fashioned black and white habits, with wimples and veils, and they were taught to avoid friendships and personal conversation. Today they live in apartments, some alone and some with other sisters, developing friendships and dressing as they please. As high school and college teachers, they were all well-educated, but today they can choose their assignments, and many work in other social service professions. During the transition from the past to the present, a great many young women left the order—as many as four out of five of those entering in some years—some because of too much change and others because of too little, whether in the order or in the church. The ones I met were forceful women who had been able to embrace a radical change in the pattern of their lives by recognizing continuity in discontinuity. They could assert that their commitment was still evolving, which helped them to be patient with the rigidities of the institution, to find discontinuity in