Prisons we choose to live in, by Doris Lessing

I spend some time wondering, how do you think we will appear to those coming after us? And this is not idle concern, but a deliberate attempt to support the capacity of that "damned other" we can turn to to judge ourselves. Everyone who reads history realizes that strong, complex convictions in one century often seem silly and strange to the next century. She is the grandmother who was born after the end of the First World War, to grow up and live through the events of the Second World War, the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, to pass on to us, at the age of sixty-six, her reflections on the events she experienced in her youth. Her spirit was immersed in the spirit of the reckless, emotionally driven, and mentally blinded crowd, and her individual consciousness merged with the collective consciousness, to wake up after those events from this coma, amazed and bewildered. Not only from herself, but from the individuals involved in all historical events whose awareness was intertwined with the collective consciousness. To conclude the book with a message — as a writer — leaning towards optimism, to her grandchildren (the coming generations), explaining the important role of literature and history in understanding how ideas and human behavior are formed. This helps in avoiding past mistakes, freeing oneself from inherited customs, and gaining patience and intellectual prudence to build an independent free mind that will be a building block for a bright future. Number of pages: 104