Raul Julia makes this remark in some nutty movie about a cross-country automobile race. I don't remember much more about the movie, but that line always struck me as profound, even though in some very basic ways I would never agree with it. I can't help being captivated by the past, especially my own. And I also believe that those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. But those are personal reflections. The reality is that time really does keep on slipping into the future, and there's nothing any of us can do about it. In some ways we tend to believe that nothing ever really changes, except that it does. And when it does there's no going back.
This is most obvious on the level of technical changes. When was the last time you bought a phonograph record? How many people even own a turntable or record player? Well, in fact, I still have a turntable and a reel to reel tape deck, but these are antiques, just like my cassette deck. Even the CD player is on its way out. I still subscribe to two newspapers, but I can already foresee the day when newspapers will be a distant memory of a bygone age, like ice boxes and rotary dials on telephones and analogue televisions and gas powered automobiles.
I'm sure that every generation feels this sense of loss at what we so casually abandon to the march of progress. We wonder what it must be like to be young at such a time, forgetting that our own parents and grandparents had the same experience when we were living in our own best of all possible worlds. The hunter gatherers must have wondered why their kids wanted to plant crops and settle down. We can't imagine how folks will get by without the wolves and polar bears, but they'll probably never miss them, any more than they'll miss broadcast radio or seafood that really comes from the ocean, or breathing without an air purification apparatus. You get used to what you're used to, so just don't look back.
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