Frozen history in our own lifetimes

 

When we first become aware of the existence of history in a meaningful way, we learn that our life has been very short and history has been very long. I remember that the idea of years passing somehow got through to me at a certain level in 1963. For a while I thought 1962 was long ago and anything in 1963 or later was recent. I remember looking up in the local college bookstore at things you could buy related to the class of 1971 or 1972 -- perhaps this was 1968 or so. Those years seemed impossibly far in the future. A "7"in the tens place? Hard to imagine! Initial correct observation when young: Our individual life is very short and history is very long.

Perhaps this is a partial explanation of a phenomenon I've observed in myself. Everything that has happened since I was a teen is recent history, but before that point history is to be measured out in the real decades that make it up and stretch into the distant past.

As one example, I was pretty firmly plugged in to current events starting in 1968, when I was 13 years old. That is 54 years ago. If I think of the history involved in the previous 54 years, it covers enormous ground -- 1914 to 1968. Two world wars and a depression. The availability of nuclear weapons to both sides in the Cold War gave rise to a "nuclear peace". Everything that has happened since then is to me recent history because it was part of my awareness as it happened. But 1914 seems a year from the far distant past, and 1968 seems recent. Emotionally considered, perhaps 80% of the time from 1914 to now happened before 1968, and the other 20% since then! As the decades of my life have gone by, that original idea that "I've lived a very short while and history is very long" persists even as it becomes less true all the time. I'm curious if others experience this.

You could argue that in fact less has happened in these latest 54 years compared to the 54 that came before. That would be true in terms of wholesale destruction, perhaps, but is not true in a great many other areas. The internet looms large. Even cell phones do. An enormous reduction in poverty happened along with dramatically better medical care. Technological miracles are cheap and abundant.

In my home town of Durham, New Hampshire, my oldest brother went to his first year of high school arranged in split shifts, because there simply was not enough space to fit all the high school students in the building at one time. In 1965 a new high school opened that relieved that problem. I went to this brand new high school, graduating in 1972. It was several years ago that someone remarked that the Durham high school was definitely old and needed replacing. Wait, it's brand new! But not actually, when I do the math. If I heard this in 2016, it was 51 years old, which I guess is getting on for a high school.

Within the course of my life, time also speeds up. The attacks of 9/11/2001 that seem liked recent history were more than 20 years ago. Twenty years before that was when Ronald Reagan was elected. That seems far more than twice as long ago as 9/11. This, however feels like a more common observation.