Walking the Wall

I just finished a book I (yet again) picked up for 50 cents at the library sale room (love that room)–as a side note, I really like the sale room because I find that I tend to read books I might never pick up normally and that is a good thing. Anyway, the book is Ferney by James Long and it is similar in the "love across space and time" as The Time Traveler’s Wife–it was a good read and kept me sucked in all day. It reminded me a lot of James Blunt’s music, it had the same resonance and many of the songs on his album connected with the book.

One thing I really liked about this book was the author’s  explanation of time:

"History’s much shorter than people think."
She laughed then, caught by the absurdity. "What?"
"You don’t know what I mean? Well now, I was born in 1907," he said deliberately, scratching at the ground with the end of his walking stick as if to inscribe the date. "You stretch my life forward from there and you get to here. Thing is, though, to me it really doesn’t feel like this life of mine has taken all that long. It’s rushed by, really, that’s how years are when you’re living them. They don’t use up much time at all." He looked hard at her. "You can do sums. You tell me what happens if you stretch my life back the other way."
"Eighty-three years back the other way? You get to 1824."
"Eighteen twenty-four. Go back again from there."
"Another eighty-three years? 1741."
"And once more."
"Makes 1658."
"That’s right, 1658. Only four of my lifetimes back from here and there you are. Think about that. Oliver Cromwell died. The plague hadn’t come yet. .."
— "For most people, they think back to when they were babies and that’s nothing, that’s just like yesterday. Fifty years in your lifetime is hardly time to get your garden right. Ask them to go back just one year before they were born, though, and that’s something else, that’s ancient history…

—Henry the Eighth? Five old man’s lives back. The Magna Carta and all that rubbish? Eight lives. It’s nothing, is it?"

My grandmother turned 90 years old this year. She was born in 1916. One of her lifetimes backward is 1826, two lifetime’s back and it’s 1736–so just three of her lifetimes (if I managed to do the math right) from this year and this country wasn’t even an independent nation! And yet, what frustrates me so much when talking (debating…arguing…it’s all relative) about the effects of slavery or women’s rights issues, or Native American social effects is when inevitably people wave their hand and dismiss it, aren’t we over that, they ask, that was so long ago! So long ago? Not so long ago, only two of my grandmother’s lifetime’s back and it was still forty years before the Emancipation Proclamation and within her own lifetime she remembers working at a restaurant that would not serve "colored" people. Is it any wonder we still have a lot of issues to work out in society, and perhaps an understanding of how short history really is might result in a little more compassion for where we are today.