Sitting at the hotel terrace, I am watching a mother and her daughter at a neighboring table. They are identical, except that one is old and the other young. And that one is ugly and the other beautiful. Relatively speaking, of course. What strikes me as strange, especially when I struggle to remember my youth, is that no-one the daughter’s age can possibly see her mother in her. That is, the ignominious future hiding just beneath the surface. Or twenty years at most. From the vantage point of my own age, the whole thing looks like a cruel hoax. As if blindness were built into the young regardless of the truth most palpable. Nay, as if the future were rendered intangible on a mere whim of, say, Mother Nature.