Nov 19, 2023·edited Nov 19, 2023Liked by Greg Olear
Sometimes your insights are so sharp, they hurt.
In any case, before breaking to read your Sunday Pages, I was just sitting here journaling and thinking about how to describe a curious experience I had while hiking in the hidden hollers where I now live in Appalachia.
What I am pondering -- something which your own musing amplifies -- is that words as a collective thing have been fed into the currents of our modern day machinery, and as such have lost currency; the value of words in a world stuffed with words is decreasing.
Yes, the mystical weird experience I had in the woods might defy symbolism, which is really all words are -- squiggles of standardized, encodified meaning -- but that words increasingly have less value in this world, is it because they have less meaning? Do the have less utility?
To wit, your observation of how time has gone from lengths to blobs, it makes me wonder if what is happening now is a growing conscious awareness of the compression of all experience into the present, and so words can no longer sufficiently shape our relationship to time.
Words we do use are shorter than ever, misspelled and flung into punctuationless texts. I suppose this is indicative of there being less space to travel in between us all, as the awareness of All grows deeper and more vast.
The falcon can no longer hear the falconer, but perhaps the new technology won't require us to hear and speak.
It seems to me that technology is alarming us into the realization that there is more to perceive than what we have settled for by accepting the Status Quo's shunted insistence that 5 senses are enough.
Words themselves might be the technology that is on the brink of irrelevance. I don't know, but it was what was on my mind when your missive came along...
Excellent insights, Whitney! Isn't it interesting that these thoughts came to you whilst you were away from technology and communing with nature? I find my most "human" moments come when I am surrounded by trees, nature, and all of the inhabitants of nature. And in those moments, there are usually no words being spoken - just my own thoughts and feelings.
Nov 19, 2023·edited Nov 19, 2023Liked by Greg Olear
Shit. I just lost my entire post to you. I will try again...yes, I agree. For a while, I have been considering that the more "spacey" our knowledge transfer becomes, the more humans will need to be grounded. Thus, we need Earth more than ever. And yet, our reality will be more ethereal. I am still working out the contours of that, but I think I am right about it.
Something else I have been wondering about is the evolution of people discussing their sense of personal power. When the radio and TV first came about, no one discussed their personal "space" (again, the idea of "space"), their personal power, their empowerment, their boundaries around their power, space, and agency...now it's actually tedious and pervasive, the amount of blather about boundaries and how when we cross them the other person is all butt hurt. True, identity politics are the result of hierarchical grooves which put us all into slots with walls around which we're unable to see, but ffs, we're now able to see that it was all a lie. So, the idea that we need to keep reinforcing our personal and political spaces with words and wounds...
When did that start? When will it end, if ever? In a way, I wonder if the advent of radio and TV were the necessary loosening of our sense that we had to own and identify ourselves through words at all.
A thought, not original to me, is that the need to define our "personal space" and "personal power" began with the dawning of the Nuclear Age, when the power to destroy was put in our hands. What I personally have then found intriguing is that Oppenheimer is German for "opener of houses", which then leads me to think of Blake's "doors of perception" which were the liminal spaces between heaven and hell. So, is it possible that we now have doors to houses that contain the power of All?
And, because that is too freaky and freaking powerful to accept, we just act like assholes and cling to the various ways we can slow down the gyre (back to Yeats now), such as fascism and spiritual bypassing allow us to do?
Which is my way of gushing out all the reasons why I generally spend as much time in nature as I can, and less time talking and writing, except right now, but I blame Greg.
Ha! Yes to everything you said here! "Where did it all start?' I have a very simple answer - trauma. We all are affected by trauma differently in our lives. The "macho man" refused to acknowledge his trauma and ends up consumed by it. The "perfectionist" pretends they have addressed it but really they just bury it and it manifests in unseemly ways. That is why we must look at a person's actions rather than what they say - words may not belie the truth. What I have found is that accepting responsibility for the part you have played in the trauma in your life is the first step to healing that trauma. Blaming is poison. That is one of the saddest parts of the MAGA crowd - their mentality is to blame others for their lot in life. It is a very immature way of thinking. And yes, Professor Olear is to blame for pushing us to think so deeply about things. Thank you, Greg!
I agree with you. I believe denied trauma is the root cause of what we are experiencing today both in politics and culture in general as evidenced by the politics of scapegoating and projection.
Well said, Gail. Yes, the trauma, trauma upon trauma, generational trauma, inherited trauma.
Words, though...I feel like most of us...certainly me...have the capability and capacity to be monsters. There are thoughts we have, which we can't control, that if we tweeted them out would be awful. But it's important to KNOW that, to realize it, and to react to it. To me, that is the essence of wisdom: to see beyond our own biases and prejudices, which we all have. And words help articulate all of that, to elevate our thinking. Without words, I fear we'd just be all id.
It’s interesting that you and Kathleen mention trauma. I do believe trauma exists in every household now. People can deny it but it envelops us in the news especially, if we are paying attention. I am getting ready to read “The Postcard” by Anne Berest. It is about generational trauma and survival because of the Holocaust. Being that I am the daughter of Holocaust victims, I am very interested in this book. I am certain my emotions will be all over the place but I will grip the side of the bed, shed tears, and keep reading.
Yes, it is so important to heal ancestral trauma. It affects us all and denial of it leads to perpetual trauma that gets handed down to the next generation. Best wishes on your journey - the hardest part is allowing the difficult emotions to come to the surface, really feeling them and then letting them go thereby healing them. Doing this is so important. Mazel tov.
I did not know that about Oppenheimer's name. Interesting.
This doesn't have anything to do with what you said directly, but it seems relevant: new media, no matter what it is, is neither inherently good nor bad. There used to be bumper stickers up here that said KILL YOUR TELEVISION. And, like, yeah, we get it, you don't watch TV, but there's a lot of really good stuff on TV. The bumper sticker might as well say BURN YOUR LIBRARY. It's up to us humans to make the media work for us and not against us. We're watching it play out in real time on Twitter, which is now called X, which is, to hearken back to your initial post, a mark illiterates make to sign their name.
I keep wondering about the death of Twitter. Is it to save us from ourselves? As you said in your previous post, "There are thoughts we have, which we can't control, that if we tweeted them out would be awful." I wonder if we are about to cross a line where we won't have these platforms to spew our every thought out to the random public. Disinformation and Misinformation have always irked me but now it's on a deeper level than before. Will everyone will just go to their chosen platform that reinforces their beliefs and the opposing views will no longer mix? Is that more dangerous than the current iteration of Twitter (I will not call it "X"!)?
I have my best ideas in the shower, or else when walking through a door. It's very strange how that is. There is a quietness that I think we lack, that we all crave on some level. Nature brings that kind of quietness.
This is a fascinating idea. The first writing was not words but symbols. Images, basically. Maybe this is just one big circle and we are on the waning side of a need for words? I'm not sure how consciousness is possible without words. Don't we have to have a language to think in?
Another thought: penmanship. Dying if not dead. Kids aren't taught cursive. The act of writing with a pen, the physicality of it, the degree of difficulty even relative to typing or the word-to-text that I refuse ever to use...it connects to the brain differently. I have to take notes and make lists by hand. And do math.
I don't know what any of that means, but it seems relevant to your thoughtful comment.
You're on the same wavelength, I think. Also, fwiw, I noticed this weekend that my handwriting has changed since just this summer. I started actually paying to attention to it when earlier this week, a family member told me my handwriting was too difficult to read. I had always been the one with "pretty" handwriting, and now it's just a poiny mess. Either I am losing my faculties, or the change reflects a change in my way of communicating, primarily to myself because as you point out, no one is actually *writing* to anyone anymore. I just have to write notes and journals and lists for my own sake, and yeah, my handwriting now looks shitty. But the take-away is that yeah, this is has been a year of massive change for me, and I think my handwriting could indeed indicate that I am thinking and processing information differently as a result.
My handwriting has always been very hard to read. So for me, typing has been the best way to communicate the written word. My two daughters were the last of the kids in our community that were required to learn cursive. They hated it! It was a real struggle to get them to practice when the would say "I'm never going to have use it!" My college roommate and I would write each other letters when we were on break from school - they are a time capsule of what was happening at the time and I'm so glad I have them!
Always a mind warp, lots to process for an oldie, whose childhood was defined by radio, teens by tv, 20’s by both, 30’s by tv, cameras and space-age gadgets, 40’s by Walkman’s, and all that came before, 60’s by VCR’s, calculators and computers, 70’s by laptops, and more technology than I ever knew existed. Life started changing by the nanosecond. I often thought about peasants of old whose lives changed little over their short life span. Don’t know if we are blessed or cursed. Love the poems, they say so much with so little verbiage.
Oh, the Walkmans! How wonderful they were, and how they led to now, when we can walk around in a bubble, not hearing what is around us, not being present. And yet how could we ever go back? I wouldn't want that, either.
So much food for thought here, Greg! As you know I love Radio. For me it is a true connection point - the seeming randomness of what song plays at a certain time. I was having a conversation with a new friend a few years ago, and she was asking me if I was worried about 5G. I told her that I was not worried at all. I relayed to her that when FM radio really took hold, all the adults around me thought it was the beginning of the end of the world. I loved it because the sound was amazing and all of these new stations began popping up and playing the music I love. Shout out to Edwin Armstrong - here is a interesting article on the history of FM radio, which also shows that Corporate Greed has had its' hand in the amplification of all technological advancements: https://radiofidelity.com/the-history-of-fm-radio/
Nov 19, 2023·edited Nov 19, 2023Liked by Greg Olear
I love Radio also, in large part because my father was a radio broadcaster and I grew up with the medium. in the 50's and 60's. My intuition tells me that there is still a niche audience for legacy radio - original comedy (my dad wrote his own comedy sketches), the music, and "theater of the mind", which requires a listener in a hyper stimulated media environment to create a setting in his or her mind. For example, although it was a TV show, WKRP's now legendary Thanksgiving Day episode "depicted" the turkey drop and resulting disaster totally via Les Nessman's description, which IMHO makes it funnier because the audience was creating the scene for themselves.
I shared this link before, but you might enjoy "Something In The Air", a history of modern radio (which includes FM radio) written by Marc Fisher. Link below features a brief description.
ETA: Thank you for the link to history of FM. It was fascinating! I remember FM seeming to come into its own in the late 1960's when I was a college student.
The other thing about radio is a real time interaction with other segments - farm reports, news, weather, traffic. My dad worked the old school analog boards, which meant he plugged the spots into a cartridge, cued the music on a turntable, and brought the live elements on to the board via the "pots". Plus he did his own comedy bits punctuated with sound effects on either carts or vinyl. I loved watching him work. He was like a maestro conducting a symphony. The precision required produced a unique rhythm which podcasts can't replicate.
Nov 19, 2023·edited Nov 19, 2023Liked by Greg Olear
I was an early adopter of both the iPod and iPhone and now I wonder if that technology has been a blessing or a curse. I was in France in July 2010 and was the only one with an iPhone since it had not been sold in Europe yet. Met one American man with an iPad. How times have changed.
At some point we will have implants in our brains, and everything we do now with a phone we'll be able to do with our minds. I wrote a third of a sci-fi novel about that 20 years ago.
Brilliant. You'd think we'd prize equilibrium -- but it seems we have no say in the matter. We're somewhere on the steepening curve but who's to say where? Children of acceleration, wondering where the asymptote is and what happens when we reach it.
Thanks. I keep thinking of Cloud Atlas -- one of the truly great novels of recent vintage -- and the middle, the section that goes all the way through, is far in the future but reads like far in the past because they had to start over, and the language and tech are rudimentary. For all we know, this is the seventh or eighth time humans have gotten to this point, only for some Great Flood to wash all the evidence away...
I share Robin Broshi’s sentiment that what’s going on in our lives—like child rearing and establishing a career—and being in the military—fundamentally affects how we view what’s going on in the world and how we recall it later. For me the blur seems to span at least a couple decades, but it seems like the blur relates to how my present memory of that era is affected rather than my perception at the time. Are historians, being inescapably human, any more objective than, say, I am?
There is also the fact that as we get older, there is more life to process, and we necessarily forget more, whereas an eighth grader remembers every last slight. That is also part of the blur, the constant expansion onto my brain's finite hard drive.
Sometimes your insights are so sharp, they hurt.
In any case, before breaking to read your Sunday Pages, I was just sitting here journaling and thinking about how to describe a curious experience I had while hiking in the hidden hollers where I now live in Appalachia.
What I am pondering -- something which your own musing amplifies -- is that words as a collective thing have been fed into the currents of our modern day machinery, and as such have lost currency; the value of words in a world stuffed with words is decreasing.
Yes, the mystical weird experience I had in the woods might defy symbolism, which is really all words are -- squiggles of standardized, encodified meaning -- but that words increasingly have less value in this world, is it because they have less meaning? Do the have less utility?
To wit, your observation of how time has gone from lengths to blobs, it makes me wonder if what is happening now is a growing conscious awareness of the compression of all experience into the present, and so words can no longer sufficiently shape our relationship to time.
Words we do use are shorter than ever, misspelled and flung into punctuationless texts. I suppose this is indicative of there being less space to travel in between us all, as the awareness of All grows deeper and more vast.
The falcon can no longer hear the falconer, but perhaps the new technology won't require us to hear and speak.
It seems to me that technology is alarming us into the realization that there is more to perceive than what we have settled for by accepting the Status Quo's shunted insistence that 5 senses are enough.
Words themselves might be the technology that is on the brink of irrelevance. I don't know, but it was what was on my mind when your missive came along...
Very insightful. I have to think about Greg’s words and yours for a while…
Communication is the never-ending story...
Well put, Rick.
Excellent insights, Whitney! Isn't it interesting that these thoughts came to you whilst you were away from technology and communing with nature? I find my most "human" moments come when I am surrounded by trees, nature, and all of the inhabitants of nature. And in those moments, there are usually no words being spoken - just my own thoughts and feelings.
Shit. I just lost my entire post to you. I will try again...yes, I agree. For a while, I have been considering that the more "spacey" our knowledge transfer becomes, the more humans will need to be grounded. Thus, we need Earth more than ever. And yet, our reality will be more ethereal. I am still working out the contours of that, but I think I am right about it.
Something else I have been wondering about is the evolution of people discussing their sense of personal power. When the radio and TV first came about, no one discussed their personal "space" (again, the idea of "space"), their personal power, their empowerment, their boundaries around their power, space, and agency...now it's actually tedious and pervasive, the amount of blather about boundaries and how when we cross them the other person is all butt hurt. True, identity politics are the result of hierarchical grooves which put us all into slots with walls around which we're unable to see, but ffs, we're now able to see that it was all a lie. So, the idea that we need to keep reinforcing our personal and political spaces with words and wounds...
When did that start? When will it end, if ever? In a way, I wonder if the advent of radio and TV were the necessary loosening of our sense that we had to own and identify ourselves through words at all.
A thought, not original to me, is that the need to define our "personal space" and "personal power" began with the dawning of the Nuclear Age, when the power to destroy was put in our hands. What I personally have then found intriguing is that Oppenheimer is German for "opener of houses", which then leads me to think of Blake's "doors of perception" which were the liminal spaces between heaven and hell. So, is it possible that we now have doors to houses that contain the power of All?
And, because that is too freaky and freaking powerful to accept, we just act like assholes and cling to the various ways we can slow down the gyre (back to Yeats now), such as fascism and spiritual bypassing allow us to do?
Which is my way of gushing out all the reasons why I generally spend as much time in nature as I can, and less time talking and writing, except right now, but I blame Greg.
Ha! Yes to everything you said here! "Where did it all start?' I have a very simple answer - trauma. We all are affected by trauma differently in our lives. The "macho man" refused to acknowledge his trauma and ends up consumed by it. The "perfectionist" pretends they have addressed it but really they just bury it and it manifests in unseemly ways. That is why we must look at a person's actions rather than what they say - words may not belie the truth. What I have found is that accepting responsibility for the part you have played in the trauma in your life is the first step to healing that trauma. Blaming is poison. That is one of the saddest parts of the MAGA crowd - their mentality is to blame others for their lot in life. It is a very immature way of thinking. And yes, Professor Olear is to blame for pushing us to think so deeply about things. Thank you, Greg!
So, the question is, does Greg accept responsibility for this conversation?
Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.
; )
I would say "Observer of Worlds"!
I agree with you. I believe denied trauma is the root cause of what we are experiencing today both in politics and culture in general as evidenced by the politics of scapegoating and projection.
Well said, Gail. Yes, the trauma, trauma upon trauma, generational trauma, inherited trauma.
Words, though...I feel like most of us...certainly me...have the capability and capacity to be monsters. There are thoughts we have, which we can't control, that if we tweeted them out would be awful. But it's important to KNOW that, to realize it, and to react to it. To me, that is the essence of wisdom: to see beyond our own biases and prejudices, which we all have. And words help articulate all of that, to elevate our thinking. Without words, I fear we'd just be all id.
It’s interesting that you and Kathleen mention trauma. I do believe trauma exists in every household now. People can deny it but it envelops us in the news especially, if we are paying attention. I am getting ready to read “The Postcard” by Anne Berest. It is about generational trauma and survival because of the Holocaust. Being that I am the daughter of Holocaust victims, I am very interested in this book. I am certain my emotions will be all over the place but I will grip the side of the bed, shed tears, and keep reading.
Yes, it is so important to heal ancestral trauma. It affects us all and denial of it leads to perpetual trauma that gets handed down to the next generation. Best wishes on your journey - the hardest part is allowing the difficult emotions to come to the surface, really feeling them and then letting them go thereby healing them. Doing this is so important. Mazel tov.
Little more E.H. emphasis
It is all my fault. : )
I did not know that about Oppenheimer's name. Interesting.
This doesn't have anything to do with what you said directly, but it seems relevant: new media, no matter what it is, is neither inherently good nor bad. There used to be bumper stickers up here that said KILL YOUR TELEVISION. And, like, yeah, we get it, you don't watch TV, but there's a lot of really good stuff on TV. The bumper sticker might as well say BURN YOUR LIBRARY. It's up to us humans to make the media work for us and not against us. We're watching it play out in real time on Twitter, which is now called X, which is, to hearken back to your initial post, a mark illiterates make to sign their name.
I keep wondering about the death of Twitter. Is it to save us from ourselves? As you said in your previous post, "There are thoughts we have, which we can't control, that if we tweeted them out would be awful." I wonder if we are about to cross a line where we won't have these platforms to spew our every thought out to the random public. Disinformation and Misinformation have always irked me but now it's on a deeper level than before. Will everyone will just go to their chosen platform that reinforces their beliefs and the opposing views will no longer mix? Is that more dangerous than the current iteration of Twitter (I will not call it "X"!)?
Yep. I yearn to hear the silence scream!
That is called Tinnitus--believe me, it's not that great : )
I was born with a tin ear
I have my best ideas in the shower, or else when walking through a door. It's very strange how that is. There is a quietness that I think we lack, that we all crave on some level. Nature brings that kind of quietness.
Water is a great conductor of mystical energy as well as nature.
To be a Falcon.
PEREGRINE by A.J. Baker
Yes, Cal.
This is a fascinating idea. The first writing was not words but symbols. Images, basically. Maybe this is just one big circle and we are on the waning side of a need for words? I'm not sure how consciousness is possible without words. Don't we have to have a language to think in?
Another thought: penmanship. Dying if not dead. Kids aren't taught cursive. The act of writing with a pen, the physicality of it, the degree of difficulty even relative to typing or the word-to-text that I refuse ever to use...it connects to the brain differently. I have to take notes and make lists by hand. And do math.
I don't know what any of that means, but it seems relevant to your thoughtful comment.
You're on the same wavelength, I think. Also, fwiw, I noticed this weekend that my handwriting has changed since just this summer. I started actually paying to attention to it when earlier this week, a family member told me my handwriting was too difficult to read. I had always been the one with "pretty" handwriting, and now it's just a poiny mess. Either I am losing my faculties, or the change reflects a change in my way of communicating, primarily to myself because as you point out, no one is actually *writing* to anyone anymore. I just have to write notes and journals and lists for my own sake, and yeah, my handwriting now looks shitty. But the take-away is that yeah, this is has been a year of massive change for me, and I think my handwriting could indeed indicate that I am thinking and processing information differently as a result.
My handwriting has always been very hard to read. So for me, typing has been the best way to communicate the written word. My two daughters were the last of the kids in our community that were required to learn cursive. They hated it! It was a real struggle to get them to practice when the would say "I'm never going to have use it!" My college roommate and I would write each other letters when we were on break from school - they are a time capsule of what was happening at the time and I'm so glad I have them!
I love cursive writing
Powerful and sad
Always a mind warp, lots to process for an oldie, whose childhood was defined by radio, teens by tv, 20’s by both, 30’s by tv, cameras and space-age gadgets, 40’s by Walkman’s, and all that came before, 60’s by VCR’s, calculators and computers, 70’s by laptops, and more technology than I ever knew existed. Life started changing by the nanosecond. I often thought about peasants of old whose lives changed little over their short life span. Don’t know if we are blessed or cursed. Love the poems, they say so much with so little verbiage.
Oh, the Walkmans! How wonderful they were, and how they led to now, when we can walk around in a bubble, not hearing what is around us, not being present. And yet how could we ever go back? I wouldn't want that, either.
My foster child escaped a lot of negative stuff “plugged in.” But he did unplug for therapy.
I LOVED my Walkman!
So much food for thought here, Greg! As you know I love Radio. For me it is a true connection point - the seeming randomness of what song plays at a certain time. I was having a conversation with a new friend a few years ago, and she was asking me if I was worried about 5G. I told her that I was not worried at all. I relayed to her that when FM radio really took hold, all the adults around me thought it was the beginning of the end of the world. I loved it because the sound was amazing and all of these new stations began popping up and playing the music I love. Shout out to Edwin Armstrong - here is a interesting article on the history of FM radio, which also shows that Corporate Greed has had its' hand in the amplification of all technological advancements: https://radiofidelity.com/the-history-of-fm-radio/
I love Radio also, in large part because my father was a radio broadcaster and I grew up with the medium. in the 50's and 60's. My intuition tells me that there is still a niche audience for legacy radio - original comedy (my dad wrote his own comedy sketches), the music, and "theater of the mind", which requires a listener in a hyper stimulated media environment to create a setting in his or her mind. For example, although it was a TV show, WKRP's now legendary Thanksgiving Day episode "depicted" the turkey drop and resulting disaster totally via Les Nessman's description, which IMHO makes it funnier because the audience was creating the scene for themselves.
I shared this link before, but you might enjoy "Something In The Air", a history of modern radio (which includes FM radio) written by Marc Fisher. Link below features a brief description.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/something-in-the-air-marc-fisher/1100290197
ETA: Thank you for the link to history of FM. It was fascinating! I remember FM seeming to come into its own in the late 1960's when I was a college student.
Oh, wow, that's so cool about your dad! Podcasts are kind of like radio, but radio you can start and stop at will. Which is both good and bad.
The other thing about radio is a real time interaction with other segments - farm reports, news, weather, traffic. My dad worked the old school analog boards, which meant he plugged the spots into a cartridge, cued the music on a turntable, and brought the live elements on to the board via the "pots". Plus he did his own comedy bits punctuated with sound effects on either carts or vinyl. I loved watching him work. He was like a maestro conducting a symphony. The precision required produced a unique rhythm which podcasts can't replicate.
How wonderful that your Dad was able to use all of his talents in one amazing job! He sounds so interesting!
Thanks, Gail. The randomness, and the way they'd play stuff there was no other access to...this is something lost to my kids' generation.
I was an early adopter of both the iPod and iPhone and now I wonder if that technology has been a blessing or a curse. I was in France in July 2010 and was the only one with an iPhone since it had not been sold in Europe yet. Met one American man with an iPad. How times have changed.
At 83 my smartphone boosted my IQ to a 100
At some point we will have implants in our brains, and everything we do now with a phone we'll be able to do with our minds. I wrote a third of a sci-fi novel about that 20 years ago.
R there still Luddites
Bravo to you and to Lindsey. You nailed it, to mix metaphors.
Thanks, Judy.
Both, I think.
THE DEATH OF SILENCE
SAD
ENJOYED THE TWO SHORT POEMS.
In another life maybe i'll be smart enough
to understand all you wrote.
Homo Habilis
From the Serengity
Not another human in sight
Not a sound.
Can hear myself breathe
Thanks, Cal.
Brilliant. You'd think we'd prize equilibrium -- but it seems we have no say in the matter. We're somewhere on the steepening curve but who's to say where? Children of acceleration, wondering where the asymptote is and what happens when we reach it.
Thanks. I keep thinking of Cloud Atlas -- one of the truly great novels of recent vintage -- and the middle, the section that goes all the way through, is far in the future but reads like far in the past because they had to start over, and the language and tech are rudimentary. For all we know, this is the seventh or eighth time humans have gotten to this point, only for some Great Flood to wash all the evidence away...
I share Robin Broshi’s sentiment that what’s going on in our lives—like child rearing and establishing a career—and being in the military—fundamentally affects how we view what’s going on in the world and how we recall it later. For me the blur seems to span at least a couple decades, but it seems like the blur relates to how my present memory of that era is affected rather than my perception at the time. Are historians, being inescapably human, any more objective than, say, I am?
There is also the fact that as we get older, there is more life to process, and we necessarily forget more, whereas an eighth grader remembers every last slight. That is also part of the blur, the constant expansion onto my brain's finite hard drive.
Perhaps the cell phone marks the present ‘Age.’ Life changed.
Billserle.com
Yes, the critical mass of smartphones for sure, Bill.
What an excellent, nah, a great read today, nah, tonight 🍸! Bravo, 🙌🏼,
Thanks, Steven!
I had never heard that poem, and I like it a lot. Thanks!