One thing I’m really enjoying about aging is the visceral understanding of long passages of time. When I was younger, I thought I understood the power of time. When reading books or watching movies that poignantly dealt with aging, old age, or death, my emotions were appropriately moved and spirt touched. However, what I’ve learned as I myself have gotten older, is how ultimately one-dimensional that perspective was. My understanding of time, and the way it deepens my life, is surprising, unexpected, and poignant.
Lately I’ve been thinking about 25 years ago: what was going on 25 years ago? Miami Vice, Top Gun, Duran Duran, Vuarnet sunglasses…those are all part of my past, and some of the popular culture anchors and artifacts. However, more than just a number, I very concretely understand what those 25 years passing means. I know what it feels like to have lived that time, and I have seen so many, many, many other things pass through and around my life. I can not only see the things of 25 years ago but the arc of experiences between the two points in time.
That experience of really understanding the passage of my last 25 years is, in itself, poignant. But even more than that is extrapolating that knowledge to other periods.
25 years before 25 years ago – that is, 50 years – was 1961. At that point John F. Kennedy was president. The Vietnam War was not even on the radar. “The 60′s” as an iconic period of protest, civil rights, drugs and rock-and-roll were still to come. Muhammad Ali was still Cassius Clay, and an unknown upstart to boot.
Now, imagining _those_ realities of the world from the standpoint of the world in 1986 is really eye-opening. I know exactly what the distance from now to 1986 feels like. While a lot has happened, it also seems close in other ways. It only feels a few degrees removed from the present. That must by how 1961 felt to my parents in 1986, had they looked back. I can now understand that. Suddenly, a passage of time I didn’t even live thru – from 1961 to 1986 – makes sense.
But that’s not all. My great, great grandfather was present at the Treaty of Versailles – the first one, which ended the Franco-Prussian War and secured Germany as a sovereign nation. That was in 1871. in 1896 he had emigrated to the United States, having left his eldest son – my great grandfather – behind in Germany and had even more children in the New World. He was 46, not substantially older than me, and with a new century about to dawn must have looked back at his time as a soldier at the dawn of his fatherland with wonder. Now, thanks to my having lived an aware, (largely) adult 25 years of my own, I can see thru his eyes, grasping the tension between how far away some things now seem with how relatively similar and small they seem at the same time.
I accept that I am a super geek, unusually interested in philosophy, history and deconstructing the universe. But I’ve started applying this 25 year thing to pretty much everything historical: what was it like for Augustus Caesar, in 2 BC, to look back at the destruction of Marc Antony and Cleopatra, and his ascension to Caesar in 27 BC? I understand exactly how that would have felt. In 799, after being crowned Imperator Romanorum, Charlemagne must have remembered his visit in 774 when Pope Adrian I anointed him Patrician. How far he had come, with many, many wars and campaigns in between. In 1536, as Henry VIII cavorted with Jane Seymour and waited for Anne Boleyn to be beheaded, did he think back to 1511 and the opulent wedding to his recently deceased first wife, Catherine of Aragon? I can see thru that same gossamer.
I never would have imagined that the simple process of aging would have given me eyes through which to understand the experiences of other people, so many other people, over the centuries. While my own memories and points of context are hardly as interesting or important as the examples I used above, the very fact of living and growing have given me this delightful ability to see juxtapositions of time in a deep and wonderful way.
