How Long Ago It Feels

 Still on this? 2024 is the year of posts on memory, I guess.

When I was a kid in the 80s, going on rides across town with my parents, the radio was typically tuned to an ‘Oldies’ station, playing songs from the 50s and 60s - stuff ranging from Chuck Berry to Buffalo Springfield. I understood that this was music from when my parents were kids, and I knew enough to know what years were what, and what happened when, what was older or more recent. It was a feeling as much as a knowing - Purple Haze just sounds not-so-long-ago as A Hard Day’s Night, right? And Rockin’ Robin sounds older than any of them.

Even being, I don’t know, ten years old, I knew a basic historical outline of that time period, of the decades just prior to my existence. The presidents, the faces and names you came to recognize - the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War. Then the seventies, and the physical artifacts of that time that were all around: the cars, the clothes, the style and coloration of things that were old but not really old.

What I’m getting at is this: even back then, a kid, I was forming an outline of the recent past, and that involved a combination of knowing and feeling how long ago those things were. Forget the knowings for now - it’s trivial to say that something that happened in 1972 was longer ago than something that happened in 1978 - that 1965 was longer ago than both, that 1952 - the year my parents came into existence - was even longer back. But the feelings were in proper register. Thinking of 1952, about some artifact from that time, felt - it feels - further back than thinking of 1965. And so-on.

Those feelings are something I’ve been thinking about lately. As we get older we all are sometimes surprised at reminders at how much time has passed. In the last few days I’ve been reminded that thirty years have passed since Kurt Cobain’s suicide, a time I recall with some clarity - a few moments, people, associated with that event. Wow! It doesn’t feel like thirty years ago, does it? How time has flown!

But that’s getting close to what’s been bothering me. When I was a kid in the late 80s, thinking of the time when my parents were my age or younger, I would have a feeling of “long ago” that corresponded to thirty years in the past. That’s what thirty years ago felt like then. Honestly, it felt like distant, ancient history - pre-history, something I could only hear about or read about in books. But 1994, thirty years ago now, doesn’t feel distant in the same way. I’m aware of all that’s happened since - quite a lot, two thirds of my relatively full and varied life of changing places and people. But thirty years ago today certainly doesn’t feel like thirty years ago then.

I’ve had these kinds of ruminations lately, like we all do. Nothing special about it. But something more has occurred to me: I have the feeling that thirty years ago then feels quite similar, in fact, to sixty years ago now. The fifties feel about as long ago now as, I suspect, they did when I was younger. The feeling hasn’t updated. Those feelings of the past aren’t really about intervals extending into history. They’re feelings associated with clusters of landmarks. What the 50s, or the 30s, or the 1880s, or the 12th century, or whatever, insofar as they feel like a long time ago, or a very long time ago, feel like when I think about them, doesn’t really have to do with how long ago they were. It has to do with those periods specifically.

Then I start to think, is there really any feeling of “some time ago”? Is there anything left to consider, once I subtract out that cluster of landmarks?

So this line of thinking has actually led me to a new - to me - explanation of this illusion of time flying. It’s not that time-having-passed feels different in some way. It’s not that thirty years having passed up to today feels somehow like ten years having passed up to 1994. It’s more that I am, perhaps, not really sensitive to the interval itself - instead there is just the set of things I know about that time, the time long ago or proximal times, and thinking about that set, or of items in the set, has its own certain content, which varies relatively smoothly if I slide my window of reflection gradually back or forth. If there's anything like the feeling of an interval of passed time, of such a long interval (not the milliseconds and seconds and minutes that the psychologists study), it's really just the comparison of the feelings of now with the feelings of then.

It explains, in some ways, another phenomenon that rears its head once in a while, and which was the topic of the previous post. Sometimes in ruminating over some memory, it can almost feel as though I was just there. It was a decade ago, but if I think of it in a certain way, it could have been a moment ago. What I’m doing there, maybe, is just forgetting what now is, and becoming absorbed in then. There is, there is never, really any feeling of the time elapsed, of the distance in times.