Looking back ... again and again

By Patricia Hunt
Published: November 14, 2008

This morning before I even left for work I was watching the latest installment in the English television project “7 Up.” I had to drag myself away from it.

Inspired by the Jesuit maxim, “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man,” a group of 7-year-old children were interviewed in 1964 and every seven years afterward. They were drawn from every class, rural and city, boys and girls. The latest in the series is “49 Up.” Filmmaker Michael Apted (“Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “Gorky Park,” “Gorillas in the Mist”) has been with the project from the beginning.

What strikes me is how much the 7-year-old is the person we see at 49.  In temperament, interest, values, there is consistency over time. I am reminded that the students sitting in front of me in my classes are not clay to be molded. They are unique individuals. The best I can do for them is to help them find the work and places where they will thrive. I can’t make them into something they are not. They all have strengths and weaknesses. What sort of situation will make the most of their strengths? Where will their deficiencies not be a drawback?

By the time they reach 49 it is clear how much family means to the people in the film. They’ve been married for a long time; some are divorced. From the working class to upper class much of the satisfaction they have in life comes through the people closest to them.

Most of them are happier at 49 than earlier in their lives. The 7-year-olds are a rather solemn lot. I don’t know if American children in 1964 would have seemed so serious. Maybe this is cultural, but there was a tinge of melancholy in the faces of those little children. Their 20s were rough. In the United States we have this myth that youth is the happy time of life. If all you knew about life came from this series, you would never think that. Youth came across as the era of struggle and confusion; at least that was my take on it.

I have talked to a few other people who have seen the series, and we don’t all come to the same conclusions. It is something of a Rorschach test. We come at it with different angles of vision. We all find it poignant, however. We have enormous compassion for these people.

There are not that many people who know us from childhood on, especially those of us who have moved from place to place finding work. I wondered if we would be kinder if we could see each other as serious little 7-year-olds and then follow our lives through the decades. Rarely do we have more than a glimpse of the child that was, the anxious teen, the striving 20-year-old. We don’t see each other whole. Even those we do know over time remain something of a mystery. We see the mask but the person behind it is hidden.

On the other hand, the people in the series claim that it has been extremely difficult to have to reexamine their lives every seven years. The ones who value their privacy have found it invasive. One woman proclaimed that this would be her last time. She is opting out.

I can only imagine how it must feel to see old interviews of yourself. Some of us have a hard enough time showing someone near and dear our old photographs from elementary school. Unless a person dies young, it is rare to know someone from cradle to grave. This series may be as close as we can come. I am coming away with a profound respect for life as we human beings live it.

We hurt and we hurt others. We make mistakes. We suffer loss. The world beats up on us, and turns around and does it again. But there is something in us that keeps on trying and hoping. There is some core of dignity and worth. Either that or we are the worst of fools. The faces of fools are not what I see in “49 Up.” Foolish, maybe, but not fools. I see myself; I see us.

Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.