I turn 50 on Monday.
In Internet time, that’s like a frillion years.
I spend so much time thinking in terms of ten-thousand year intervals, glaciers advancing and retreating like metronomes and continents waving to one another as they sidle on past, that there are times when fifty years seems like hardly any time at all. I remember a toy I lost in the supermarket about 47 years ago, for instance — okay, it was a doll, all right? You got a problem with that? Huh? — and I don’t quite still want it back, but I remember the loss pretty damn clearly. I remember conversations I had like they took place yesterday though decades have passed.
So fifty doesn’t seem to me all that old, except when I get in One Of Those Moods, and Those Moods made ten seem ancient when I got them then, which I did.
It was kinda interesting, then, to read a rather sweet Financial Times “end of decade” story by Christopher Caldwell on how we perceive the past, with events we’ve lived through seeming much more recent than they really are, and events that may have happened just a few years before we were born consigned to history. (Hat tip to Barry for the link to the article.) In that article, Caldwell proposes a mental exercise:
Measure the number of years back to a certain event in your life – say, your entry into university, if you attended one. Then measure the same number of years back from there. Invariably, the event in the middle will seem closer to this year than to the older date, even though it is equidistant from the two.
He provides examples:
It is particularly discomfiting to play this game with cultural products that are supposed to be, by definition, new, fresh and youthful, like rock music, for instance. The Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) is closer to the second world war than it is to the present. The Beatles’ release of “Love Me Do” (1962) is closer to the first world war than to us. Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock (1954) is as close to the Spanish-American war (1898) as it is to us. There is nothing hipper than hip-hop, but the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” (1979), the first rap song, is closer to Al Jolson’s last hits than to the songs in the rap charts now.
It’s not every day I turn half a century old, and so this seemed an interesting game to play. My birth was half a century ago, and it seems recent. People my current age when I was born no doubt thought their own births — a century ago — just as recent, unless they were in One Of Those Moods.
Then I started looking into it, and I started to feel One Of Those Moods coming on, because I realized that when people who were my current age the day I was born were themselves born;
- Mark Twain was still alive.
- Harriet Tubman was too.
- as was Rasputin, as well as Buffalo Bill Cody
- John Muir was still walking the mountains of California, and would until an ill-advised trip to Barstow ended his life four years later.
- the distinguished scientists Alexander Emanuel Agassiz, Alfred Russel Wallace, Booker T. Washington, and Joseph Dalton Hooker were still alive scienting.
- Elizabeth Blackwell, O. Henry, William James, Winslow Homer, Julia Ward Howe, Mary Baker Eddy, William S. Gilbert, Civil War nurse Clara Barton, author Bram Stoker, and Ambrose Bierce, the inventor of snark? All still alive.
Also still alive for the birth of that hypothetical, youthful 50-year-old attending my own birth? Everyone killed in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, the sinking of the Titanic, and World War I.
And my dad’s father, who’d been born the year before. Next year I’ll be as old as he was when I was born. Now that’s old.
I love(/hate) the equidistant game. One of the first times I remember it striking me was when during the mid-90s homerun binge I realized that Maris’s 61 had held up as long as Ruth’s 60. I recently nailed my father by pointing out that he was born closer to the Mexican War than to the present.
Yep. Also, R.E.M. has played together three times as long as the Beatles did, and Scooby Doo has been in production for more than half of television broadcasting’s history.
That’s a really depressing game… But since I’m 4 days older than you, I have reason to be depressed. ;)
I inadvertently started playing a variation of this game 3 years back when my dad passed away just as I turned 30. His passing made me think of my age and my own mortality a bit clearly for the first time.
I tried to think of what my parents were doing when they were 30, and realized with shock that when my mom was 30, she had just given birth to my younger brother! I remember the day she brought him home from the hospital. I remember the year before that when she was pregnant. I had memories of my mom from when she was younger than my own age!! And when I was born, my mom was 26 and my dad was 29! I was older than both of them were when they had me! It made my head reel a bit.
Wlecome to the club, dude; I’ve got 3 months on you. Fifty really is a sobering age to reach. I was talking to / boring my daughter (13) just yesterday with stuff like this: When I was a kid, we played army and the bad guys were still always Germans. That’s because WWII was recent history then, only 20 years in the past. But the Vietnam Police Action was on TV in near real-time. Now, to kids today, Vietnam is ancient history, 40 years gone.
Those fucking Moods.
Hah, child. People who were as old when I was born as I will be at my next birthday were born in 1884, which I’m pretty sure was before anyone had died. It just goes to show that time flies whether you’re having fun or not.
OTOH, if I lived on Mars, I’d be only 33. Of course, I’d be pretty bored, too, since they don’t have internet access there yet.
I was born in 1944, and my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Corcorane, was born in 1855. She lasted till 1952. I never got to ask her about the oldest person she ever met.
I’m more intrigued by the first what-if - the assessing of events in one’s own life along the time line - but I think the example of “your entry into university” is inherently flawed.
It’s one thing to look at an event that happens when you’re thirty, and to look ten years to either side of that event, than to look at an event when, on one side, you’re an adult, and on the other, you’re a child. Children do not reckon time like adults do.
This game sucks! But it’s highly entertaining. It sheds an interesting light on perspective.
Happy birthday, Chris! I hope the day gives just what you want from it. (And you’re allowed to laugh at me for juggling your birthday for the past two months. I knew eventually it would get here, but I gave up trying to predict it. Now it’s on the calendar…)
Whinging sods. Treat aging as you would a 100 mile walk against a 50 mph headwind at -30 Centigrade. Embrace the fucker, try to understand what “Never Mind The Bollocks” means, and expire nobly at the 20 mile mark.