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  • Is This How Historians Feel All the Time?

    By Oronte October 28, 2008 4:42 pm

    Teachers, who age while the students in their classes do not, are big on noting time’s passage. Most often this is done by pointing out what their students have not—and never will—experience directly. My college professors spoke of experiences such as seeing the Stones live in concert—the first time around, when they were good, man. For my generation it’s events like the birth of MTV—when it was still about the music, man.

    Children grow up quickly—think of the differences between a ten-year old and a college freshman—but adults often change little in those seven or eight years. Is it any wonder that teachers marvel about current students, How can they not remember 9/11?

    I thought that as a man of the world, for whom time is but a lap pool, I was immune to this, but all sorts of freaky things happen when you have children of your own. It struck me like a bolt yesterday (no, Rory, not like a dolt) that the distance of my three-year old son to the Vietnam War is almost exactly my distance to World War I when I was his age. Now everybody knows WWI was a million years ago. I look back at it, and I’m fascinated, but it was a million years ago. But I was born in Vietnam at the start of the Vietnam war, and my good friend Frenchy served two tours there. That was all just yesterday. What weird short-circuit in time has occurred so that Wolfie will look back at my yesterday and get that ancient feeling?

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Comments on Is This How Historians Feel All the Time?

  • Eisenhower
  • Posted by Bob Schenck on October 29, 2008 at 6:05am EDT

  • My memory of this kind is indelible. I graduated from high school in 1961, got my B.S. in '65, my M.A. in '67, and began college teaching in the fall of '67. I'll never forget how stunned I was when a class of mine did not know what Dwight Eisenhower did before he became president. Since then, of course, I've had too many such experiences to count.

  • on children
  • Posted by Lee on October 29, 2008 at 8:56am EDT

  • As much as I hate to quote Khalil Gibran (because I'm still old enough to remember a Harlan Ellison story in which a stupid bookstore owner is tortured by being read to from The Prophet), "you can house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in a blaze of tomorrow which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams." Or something like that. Musical adaptation by Sweet Honey in the Rock.

  • Posted by Miriam Jones at UNBSJ on October 29, 2008 at 10:40am EDT

  • My dad was born in 1915 and remembers seeing a downed Zeppelin in London, so WWI has always been on my radar though I was born in 1959.

    Now the Boer War: that was a million years ago!

  • Posted by Spencer on October 30, 2008 at 1:00pm EDT

  • In 1973, at my first job after high school, one of my co-workers had enlisted in the Canadian Army at age 14. He still wept openly for the men in his platoon who had died in an artillery barrage while he had been receiving orders behind the lines. Another co-worker would also recall having waited on one of the town's last Civil War veterans in the early 1940's. And they called me "the kid" back then.

  • Posted by Todd , Moment In Time on November 1, 2008 at 11:25am EDT

  • I've had these moments, I think everyone has. For me, they bring a smile to my face because rather than thinking I'm a fossil or the students missed out on something I had the pleasure or misfortune to experience, I'm reminded that we're all just little chapters in the flow of time. My chapter will pass out and pictures of me, references to me will eventually become obscure and distant from my great-children and their contemporaries. It doesn't make me sad at all...I'll someday join a fantastic group of people(along with a few rogues and villains)who came before. They were as real in their day as I am today. But I'm still here today...I'm going to give it my all...then rest.

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