Lord willing and the creeks don't rise, I am moving to New York (upstate, that it is) in less than a week. I have been places before: I spent a few weeks in Paris, I've traveled on both coasts of Canada, I've been to conferences in southern California and the Rustbelt, and there was a brief gig as a farmhand and cowboy in rural Virginia. But Moscow, Idaho has been "home" for twenty-two years. Statistically, the chances are that there will not be another locale which I will call "home" for a longer period of time. Most people would call this turning the page on another chapter of their lives, but for me, it is more like turning the page on Book I of my life.
I'm not old. (I'm still in my early twenties.) But that doesn't mean I'm younger than the world that we live in now; I'm actually quite a bit older than it (or at least I have lived long enough to remember when it was not.) This brave new world that I am referring to is the world of the computer, of mass communication, of globalization. I remember a time when I had trouble believing that the Soviet Union could be breaking apart; that America could want any president other than George H. W. Bush; that history was the last victim of itself, consigned to the archives where only those who made a living by reinterpreting it bothered to follow. I remember I time when I could not remember where I was when the World Trade Centers came down.
This world is a new world; or else I am like a man who turned around in Socrates's hypothetical cave and saw what had been all along, though he was unaware of it. (It is not that this is an impossibility; I avoided getting an email address for as long as I could; I was twenty-one when I finally obtained a cellular phone.) In this new world, it has become easier to keep track of people, which is why no one bothers to do it anymore. We have advanced to a point where it has become polite to lie by saying "I'll keep in touch" but perhaps impolite to annul that lie by actually keeping in touch.
But, for all of that, the frontier still beckons. The world can still be remade, but not until it remakes us first. And, if the primary facet of this current world has been trivialization, what will the next era bring I wonder?
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"I remember . . . that history was the last victim of itself, consigned to the archives. . ."
You were reading Fukayama when you were 13?
We didn't feel that history had ended because Fukuyama wrote that it did; Fukuyama wrote that history had ended because we felt that it did.
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