composing history

I wrote this on Sunday, September 25, 2016, on my old blog, caeusura:

Because I have a longer train journey to and from work now, I'm reading books a lot more. That's what I do on the train - I don't go online, though I probably could if I brought my laptop with me - I read and write the old fashioned way. I read books - the ones made with paper - and I write in a notebook...pen and paper.

I'm enjoying it, that time of reading. It's a regaining of something I had lost. In the last couple of years, most of my reading has been online and it's a very frenetic affair....reading and sharing different articles...scrolling....watching videos and gifs and images...having multiple tabs open.

There's a kind of shallowness about it, or there can be, a lot of the time. There's a lot of information - a lot of stimuli. Reading a book is more restful and deeper. It's harder actually, but in a good way. Your mind is more engaged, but less taxed somehow. It's a much richer experience.

I was looking at a biography of Mary Shelley the other day, and another one about John Donne, and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke and it struck me that the remoteness of the past is increasing at an accelerating rate. The past is more alien now than it was 10 years ago, but the factor by which it is more alien is greater than a proportional factor of 10 years.

When I was younger - say, in High School - it was pretty clear that the past was different from the present. It was interesting to learn about Medieval times because life was different then. But when I think about what life is like now, that difference (between the present and the past) is more real and visceral to me because of the preternatural change I've actually lived through.

Now I have more to compare the past to. I've lived through dramatic changes. The world I grew up in was a very different place to the one I live in now. And the main changes - at least, that I've experienced - are related to technology, especially the internet.

In some ways, 20 years ago is as remote as 100 years ago. They're both inaccessible to us. The world will never be like that again. The world is irrevocably changed. That was what occurred to me when I was looking at those books - that the world as it was (even as it was 5 years ago), is gone and we can't go back.

I wonder, though, if people from the past didn't feel the same way and have a similar experience. Change is not new. It's just that, as I said, the pace of change seems to be exponential. Like, in the last 5 years, we have seen changes that previously would have taken 10 or more years to take place. But what does that mean? Does that mean that in, say, 20 years, the changes we see now in a year will happen in a few weeks?

With regard to some things, that's probably true, but change would have no meaning if there weren't things that stay the same. We can only understand books that were written in the past because we have some common ground with the past. Even ancient texts....we can understand them because some things haven't changed. Language is language, a word is a word, fear is fear, love is love.

And the past itself stays the same while, because ourselves and our world are always changing, the way we see the past is always changing.

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Now, it's nearly 2026 - another 10 years have gone by. 

Is the past more alien now than it was 10 years ago and is the factor by which it is more alien, greater than a proportional factor of 10 years?

My initial, honest reaction - I don't think it is. I think about things from the past - e.g. that fateful sojourn at the villa Diodati, with Byron, Shelley, Mary Shelley, friends and family, during which Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein....that seems as remote and as close to me now as it did 10 years ago. 

As I wrote above: "And the past itself stays the same while, because ourselves and our world are always changing, the way we see the past is always changing." Except, I wonder how much the way we see the past has changed. 

I know more about the writing of Frankenstein and circumstances surrounding it, than I did 10 years ago - because I've researched it - so my view of it has changed in that way, but it hasn't been radically reframed. 

Why did I choose that though? Would I have chosen that 10 years ago? Probably not. That's a moment in history that I have almost composed myself. It seems very close to me, not because the historical events themselves are familiar but because my research about it is familiar. I've spent time thinking and reading about it and formulating my own written response to it.