The Blog Of No Return

Sunday, August 15, 2004

You know who I envy from a historical studies perspective? The people four hundred years from now. Imagine how different it will be for them to study us, than it is for us to study people from the 1600s. Our children's children's kiddies will have (if our digital storage mediums don't fail spectactularly) audio and video of us in our daily lives. Our films, our music, our greatest leaders' speeches, news footage of our tragedies and triumphs. All of these things and more will be at their fingertips, and they will gain a much clearer portrait of daily life in our time than they could ever glean from a dusty book full of secondhand knowledge, hearsay, and conjecture.

Now more than ever, home movie footage is widespread and the technology is readily available. Theoretically, a person in the year 2400 will be able to sit down and watch footage of his or her great-great-great-great-grandmother's 16th birthday party. How absolutely amazing is that? I'd give my eye teeth and half of my lunch to see footage of my own grandfather who died in the mid-1980s. It just doesn't exist.

I think of this now because I'm always hoping to branch out of "writing what I know" and getting into something that takes place ages ago. My preference for getting the details right, however, means that I never seem to start that stuff. I can hardly get my head around the way people spoke English in the 19th century, so how could I do justice to the average man or woman's speaking style and vocabulary during the Revolutionary War? Certainly there are books and letters of the period, but the way people write often has little to do with how they speak their language. So I envy those who come after us. And beware, that time you're caught snoring on a family vacation video just might be the way you're remembered in the next millennium.
:: posted by Tim, 8:55 PM |