TIME BEFORE TIME

Culture changes perceptibly even over just a few years, like language does - things are no longer square or groovy and we all remember no internet - but the change seems to be accelerating lately, now that I've lived long enough to have had my childhood in the stone age. That's how prehistoric the present era feels now for a child of the 1940s, a time that at the time was impressively current with essentials like marbles, yo-yos, trolley cars, typewriters and carbon paper, clickety-clickety standup phones with four- or even five-digit numbers, with all the young men in fedoras, the grandpas in derbys, women in odd hats and long dresses; there was penmanship with steel pens dipped in school desktop inkwells, there were stenographers and mimeographs, horse-drawn wagons delivering milk and ice, there was no tv, no everywhere plastic, and the old styles and language (don't say ain't), culture and mores, social borders-- racism, sexism, everywhere everyone smoking, heavy social drinking, normal obesity, litter, penny candy, cigars, spittoons, the list runs on like time...

I was prompted to recherche those temps perdu when I heard in a documentary film (Scorsese's No Direction Home-- Recommended) an old-school British journalist with all the attendant perceptions, blinkers, mindsets and perspectives (he may well have interviewed young Churchill), there in the mod 1960s asking the young and sassy, full of beans, off-the-wall-out-in-left-field Bob Dylan a rhetorically baroque question that meandered along a familiar old path wound with vines and blossoms framing a white picket fence before a little cottage with maybe a portrait of Disraeli above the mantel, the kind of question that even back in the 60s was so shakespeareanly orotund　and sesquipedalianly circumlocutory that when confronted with it, or rather wrapped in it, Dylan oddly became so sympathetic as to not get his usual sassy, and as I listened to the question unwind I too felt sympathy for that elder statesman of journalism attempting to speak as though the past fit perfectly into the right-nowness of that moment, assuming that he could pinpoint this young musical upstart in the Victorian pantheon of marble-halled literary icons and empirical ideals, that he could understand in his horseback telegraph spittoon way what was now going on around him like lightning on vinyl. In his long professional life he himself had no doubt at last become his ideal of an Edwardian journalist, hadn't felt the need to make any serious self-adjustments since then and here he was, speaking from the distant past to the distant future. I suppose I'm much the same by now, how can one tell as one rambles on...

There is always a special preserve for the youth of the day, but the changes since the 1940s have been more radical than any before in history (I was　born before the atomic bomb!) and have caught many unprepared, like that senior journalist at the peak of his game, whose name might as well　have been "Mr. Jones." Used to be that small adjustments were enough-- a fancy new harness, a bustle, the latest height in a beaver hat or　a new pair of spats to get one through a life, but this acceleration is new to us cutting-edge elders; we have to adjust more quickly and to greater extremes than any of our foreparents ever did. How does one adjust to extreme changes at this speed of life?

I trust the mind, though; as it always has, it will learn new ways of keeping up with the new tools it has made, especially in the coming and coming young ones-- but this need for speed of adaptation is becoming exponential, so presents a more interesting challenge than ever before to elderfolk, who no longer sit in armchairs with ashtrays beside them and read newspapers while listening to the radio in the evening; rather they dive headfirst, over and over, into the global infosea. There's　no end to news now; we are living headlines. A most exciting time to be of advanced years.