Here’s another great quote from James Lileks, who frequently annoys me with his politics but is mucho sympatico when it comes to his sense of nostalgia, respect and curiosity about the past. He’s talking about a screen-capture from an old movie he viewed recently (the image helpfully appears in the body of the relevant Bleat, if you’re curious):
Theres the bygone world: the obligatory suit, the man sitting in a chair on the sidewalk selling the papers, the trolley in the background, the policebox from the 20s that’s been painted sixteen times. Instantly recognizable; you could fit in quickly. But utterly gone in ways we can’t even begin to imagine.
What did all the coins in their pockets look like? The trolley tokens, the brand of gum (okay, we can probably guess that), the feel of the pink and slightly furry paper receipt from the cleaners, the perfume of the woman who just passed, the odor of hair cream, and so forth. No one knew those things were important, and I suppose they weren’t – until they were gone and forgotten.
As he so often does, James has perfectly captured a notion I’ve often pondered but never gotten around to articulating: that history isn’t composed entirely of dates or headlines or politicians or battles. It’s isn’t even made up mostly of those things. The way I see it, history is made of details, thousands if not millions of tiny little experiential details just like the ones that surround us daily. We pay only passing attention to things like smells or environmental noise or even the materials that our clothes and various accessaries are made of, but if you think about it — really concentrate and think about it — you’ll realize that we are constantly losing little bits of the Way Things Used to Be, and most people probably aren’t even aware of it.
Take sounds, which have changed radically in only the last couple of decades. Everyone who is in their mid-30s like myself grew up with telephones that sat on a table or hung on a wall, and when they rang, they literally rang. There was a physical bell inside them that was struck by a little mechanical hammer device that was actuated by a current of electricity. The sound, if you used to know it, remains unforgettable today. But when was the last time you actually heard it, outside of a movie? That sound has become virtually extinct, supplanted by weird little electronic trills, or digitized music, or even — and I love this — synthetic versions of an old-fashioned mechanical telephone bell.
The heavy metallic clack of manual typewriters or the rat-a-tat-tat of electric typewriters — gone. The sounds of our automobile engines — still there, but changed. Trust me, a modern-day vehicle sounds nothing like a comparable car from the 1960s, and even less like a Model A or Model T.
How about smells? Perfumes and cosmetic fragrances come and go, and odors that were once commonplace and pleasant have a tendency to become unforgivably alien after a time. Part of the reason why Grandma always smelled weird is because she was probably still using scents that had been fashionable in her youth but were abandoned by the time we came along.
Flavors? They change, too. If you were paying attention in the ’80s, you no doubt recall the New Coke debacle. But can you recall what New Coke actually tasted like? Can you recall what original Coke tasted like before they started making it with corn syrup instead of cane sugar?
You could play this game all day once you really get going, but my point is that, as much as I personally kvetch about the loss of buildings and landmarks, they are only a small fraction of the great mass of tiny things that pass into oblivion every day. Their loss goes unnoticed most of the time, but even though these casualties of progress are often the smallest of things, they seem to present the largest barrier to our really understanding — or grokking, to use a totally geeky term — the past.
We can gaze at an old photo for hours, trying to imagine ourselves there in that moment, standing in that setting, wearing those clothes, hearing that Model T in the background, but we’ll never be able to really do it, because we’ve forgotten or never knew what all those little details were actually like. Most people probably don’t care about those missing details, but to someone like myself, who is interested in the past and would like to really, completely know what it was like to live fifty or a hundred or a thousand years ago, this is an incredibly frustrating realization.
Just as frustrating is the realization that the effect works both ways. If I ever have children, I’ll never be able to share with them exactly what it was like before they were born because all those subtle, ephemeral things that make up my current world will be gone by the time the kids are old enough to understand what the hell I’m trying to say here. I can keep journals and take lots of photos and even save favorite pieces of clothing and other souvenirs, but it will only ever be an incomplete picture of this moment, this now.
Maybe I think too much about this sort of thing, but I find these changes all very sad in some deep, fundamental way. It’s no wonder that the elderly so often seem to be completely out of touch with the world. It’s because they are. Even if they’ve stayed up on new technology and current events and such, they’re still disconnected at some basic, mundane level, because all the little details they used to know — things as simple as a particular brand of toothpaste with a particular taste and texture — are gone. Old people must surely feel some sense of loss because of that, even if it’s only on an unconscious level. And someday, everyone reading this will be in the exact same position.
Except, of course, for those of us freaks who are already starting to feel that way…
