It’s often only when the past reasserts itself that you realize how much has changed. In a pile of old papers, you might come across a bit of beautiful copperplate handwriting (a letter from a grandparent, say) and suddenly realize how seldom anyone now takes the trouble to write elegantly. With some schools abandoning the teaching of cursive writing, there may soon come a point when no one has penmanship like that; a change indeed.
Walking along a suburban street, you might see, as I did recently, a postman delivering the mail in what seemed unusually swashbuckling style. I had to look twice before I realized why he looked so dashing: Like a movie star of old, the mail carrier wore a jaunty hat and had a cigarette dangling rakishly from one corner of his mouth. He looked daring, glamorous, manly — and utterly out of his time and place. I wondered how long it would be before irate customers filed complaints against him for befouling the air on their doorsteps.
These moments are their own kind of time capsule, little surviving remnants of what used to be commonplace behaviors. They are easy to miss as you sprint through life, but poignant when they come to your notice even if, in the case of the Marlboro Man mailman, you’re not necessarily a fan of tobacco.
If the past is a foreign country, the rush of time means that even if you stay in one place eventually you cannot help but become an immigrant. Perhaps you remember how people used to live, in the old country, but it’s not how they live where you are now.
A scene on Connecticut Avenue this week really brought the idea home. It was a sultry evening, the sky was rosy with sunset, and three young men were walking northward through the throngs of other pedestrians.
There was something about their jaunty manner that set them apart, something oddly refreshing about the sight of them that was not due simply to their youth and beauty.
They stood tall as they walked, these three young men. They smiled as they talked. Two of them swung their arms; the third boy was strumming a guitar. They looked so free and happy and young — so unplugged and unhunched and absolutely present.
And that, of course, was the striking, foreign thing about them: That was the contrast they presented with the hunted hordes around them. Virtually alone on the street they were not talking on cell phones or scrolling through smart phones. They were not locked away behind earbuds, listening only to the music playing in their own heads. They did not have the abstracted middle-distance stare of people whose minds are a thousand miles away from their bodies, in the technologically induced trance to which we have all lately become habituated.
It was a time capsule moment. In the past, that foreign country, people commonly chatted to one another as they strolled, and the only individuals who walked about muttering to themselves were disturbed and possibly dangerous. Passers-by even used to nod at one another. We do not live in that country any more.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
