How old is...

"How old are you, Helena Iara?" I asked her as we came back from running errands a couple of days ago.

"Two years old."

 "Your Aunt Sandra is going to have a birthday in a couple of weeks.   Do you know how old she'll be?"

"Two years old."

"Truth is, she'll be 31."

"Yeah?" (said, by the way, exactly like that)

"And your Mommy, how old is she?"

"Two years old."

This conversation continued through quite a few people that Helena knows, and I soon discovered that I, her grandma and grandpa, her cousins, and everyone else she knows is also "Two years old."  Now, it's quite possible that "Two years old" to Helena just means "has an age" or "has parties for a birthday," or even that the answer is simply rote.  Just for a moment, though, I want to take her seriously: does she think that everyone is only two years old? And if so, why?

Here, then, a first hypothesis: for Helena, there is no real evidence that anything is older than she: in her eyes, everything came into existence simultaneously when she popped out of the womb.  Everything is two years old because she has only been able to see it for that time.  And though this idea might seem silly, it tracks one of the most important epistemological theories in western philosophy, the solipsism of Bishop Berkeley.  We naively think that our perception of the world is an interaction between our senses and the things around us, but Berkeley showed that one can coherently argue that it all goes on only in our own minds.  Though Berkeley largely wrote as a kind of thought experiment, and didn't live out his ideas (he never walked into the street in front of a carriage, thinking that the horses that would trample him were only ideas in his mind), the mere attempt to respond to his crazy idea made future thinkers (especially Kant) develop much more coherent theories of perception and knowledge.

Add the element of time to Berkeley's idea, and you get Helena's "Two years old."  The world exists because I see it; I wasn't here more than two years ago; ergo, the world and all of the things in it are two years old, just like me.

Maybe, though, I can give a second hypothesis: Mommy is two years old because, as a Mommy, she really is only two years old.  Yes, Rita was born more than two years ago, but before Helena was born, she was not a Mommy.  The baby is not the only new birth at delivery: a child creates so many new relations, roles that had not existed before.  If the child is the first in the family, a new Mommy also emerges from that operating room.  A new Daddy, too (it might be argued that my repeated existential crises over the past two years have to do with my inability to accept that at 39, I was born into a new name and new "identity.").  My parents suddenly gained new names of Gramma and Grampa.  As that, they are really only two years old.

This idea isn't solipsism, but closer to the new anthropological theory of perspectivism, which Viveiros de Castro postulates as the epistemology of Amazonian Indians.  The relationship of a capybara to a jaguar is the same as that of a monkey to a harpy eagle: they fear the predator.  So according to many amazonian tribes, when monkeys talk of eagles, they call them jaguars.  When little fish talk of jaguars, they refer to the bigger fish that eat them.  And (in an odd twist), the "jaguars" that humans have are Gods, who demand us as sacrifices.

Put this idea onto the plane of family relations, and Helena may we be right.  Because we entered into new relations when she was born, Rita and I (and my parents, and everyone else important in Helena's life) came into existence (or a new existence) when she was born.  We are, in that way, just two years old.

Does this make me feel any younger?