On the night  of August 31, 1939, a young couple in upstate New York sat in an older, borrowed Ford convertible, on a hill, overlooking Lake Ontario. They were both high school Seniors, had been going "steady" for a couple of years and planning to get married after graduation. He was also planning to go to college, she wasn't. Then... the world war. It changed everything. He was pulled into the army and killed in Belgium. She went to work in a munitions factory and then went to college.

Everything had changed. America was dragged out of the malaise of the '30s and began to cut its roots to the 19th century.

As Time Briefly Goes By

Briefly speaking…it doesn't. There is no such thing as time. There is only a perceptual measurement which humans created as a ladder to crawl through their sentience. Only the continuum exists.

So what?

So this. The perspective of history is a guide-thread in the web of human knowledge. It is the perspective and memory that defines who we are, where we are, and what we are doing. Without it, we drift… as the vast mass of us has (say 99.9%), since our first ancestors tumbled out of Africa. Other than with scholars and cognoscenti, the memory of writers, artists, warriors, politicians, criminals, et al, will simply, as always, dissipate and fade away.

Now, we have generations throughout the world who are so overwhelmed by information and imagery they are able to recognize themselves only in mirrors and digital screens. No perspective, no memory, just… what-they-see-is what-they get… and then don't.

It is becoming harder and harder to be concerned about the daily panorama of petty things: taxes, trade, nuclear destruction, environmental destruction. Petty because we are about to venture out into our solar system and beyond (if we're still here) and so few understand how small we are, how vast the universe is, how much the future is the present.

The history of our species as perceived is a series of movements, like a series of master scenes. The first movement ended with the evolution of language extended to the evolution of writing. The second closed with the discovery of the sub-atomic world and extended into so-called artificial intelligence, the electronic computer. The third, scene three,  faded to black in a Swedish laboratory where quietly, nearly unheralded, human thoughts and part of a memory were downloaded to an external silcon chip.

And now, the 4th Scene begins... the light slowly fades in on a new world. No death: immortality, timeless life. A brave new world. As this current scene in which we live extends over the coming years, there may be many less humans on the planet, almost no warfare, an end to pain, disease, poverty, and almost no suffering. Great joy and great hope? Everything will change.

Huxley was right and it scared the hell out of him.

As Time Slowly Goes by.

My life-long love affairs with books, music, and film. For the life of me, I cannot throw away a book... no matter how insipid, or useless, or decrepit. I have paperbacks, from a time when they cost only 50 cents, that are yellowed and fragile like ancient texts. I cannot break off the intimate, secret relationships, all the things we've been through together. Recent surveys show that less than 45% of the U.S. population read books (or magazines or newspapers, for that matter). The numbers are similar in Europe and much higher in many other countries. The obvious and most demeaning factor is the explosion of digital media--the pixel is replacing the ink drop.

The internet, in its quick-fix, here and there way of comprehension, doesn't lend itself to reading books. Amazon notwithstanding, the experience of reading a book on a screen is like dining alone in a delicious Italian restaurant–the intimacy of sharing is missing, in this case, the sharing of your mind with the mind of the writer. You can't get through the glass. As with all screen media activities, you're passive, sitting there as the display takes you along. With a printed book, you can touch each page with its not-perfect paper and its not-perfect ink. To experience a printed book, you have to join it. You and the writer talk to each other and share, almost as if you and the writer were the same (think bicameral mind). You don't need an on-off switch or batteries or protocols or rules. You just need light and quiet privacy. And if you're visually impaired, you have the voice of a reader, holding a book, almost as if it were the voice of the writer, which sometimes it is. This was true before 1939 and it still is today.