Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?

We're back in Brazil, and though 36 hours or traveling with a little girl will never be easy, the trip was much better than we had feared... and in the end, completely worth it when I biked down to the beach today with Helena and saw her joy as she ran through the sand and put her toes in the waves.  She's been very happy to be back: not just the sea, but also her swing in the back yard, the flowers, the lemons and passion fruit falling off the trees, the grass under her feet.  She knows, somehow, that she has come back to someplace she loves (not that she doesn't love Santa Fe -- we saw the same thing when we got there four months ago).

Helena and the ocean made me think about what it means to repeat, to come back.  It seems like such a simple thing, the "there and back again" that stands as the subtitle to the Hobbit... but one soon learns that the "back" is not the same as what we left.  Even if it hasn't changed at all, we have changed, so how we relate to it is different.  The beach, for instance: while Helena is now a little more scared of the water than she was when we left (she felt cold water in the creeks of New Mexico and in the ocean off Santa Monica), but she's much more capable of handling herself in it.

Gilles Deleuze wrote a whole book about these issues of repeating and difference, and his conclusions were about the opposite of what anyone expects.  According to him, repeating is always different (as I mentioned above), but different things are always the same: there is the same amount of difference between them, so that's the real repetition.  A brilliant but at the same time extremely silly conclusion (from a philosopher not known for his silliness), one more obvious than it sounds.  To return to the Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins is so different when he comes back from the Lonely Mountain, that the Shire itself will never be the same again: not to him, but also not to anyone else.

Another line from a favorite adolescent fantasy novel also came into my head as I watched Helena play at the edge of the ocean, Ursula LeGuin's description of the ocean of EarthSea: "Only the ever-changing is unchanging."  At 13, I thought the epigram powerful, profound... but I wonder.  Perhaps over eternity, the idea may be true: each wave moves only a little differently from the last one, and in the end, all of the waves turn into the same thing, smoothed out by a kind of transcendent static.  But in human terms (or baby terms), that isn't true at all.  Our beach is not the same as the one we left: a storm came and flattened the berm, making the waves calmer and the sea safer.  Helena will be able to swim there now, but we would never have allowed her to do so four months ago.  The ever-changing does, in fact, change.

So in the end, contrary to the pretentious cliché (Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose), the sea changes, the baby changes, the world changes.  A cynical adult may fail to see these changes, but even as a baby "returns home", she can't help but notice.

(the pictures are still from the US; we haven't had time to take any here yet)