Time's an odd thing

I remember how surprised I was when I found out that the 17th century was the 1600's, or the 18th century was the 1700's, etc. Even to this day, I have give myself a very slight, split second pause to remember to "subtract" a number when I hear "during the 15th century..." so that I know it's the 1400's they're talking about. Until I was old enough to know better, it made perfect sense to me that the 15th century would be the 1500's!

Similarly, when we celebrate our birthday, we are actually celebrating the END of that year, not the beginning. So when I turned 54, I was actually beginning my 55th year. I'm sure this is common sense to everyone else, but I was probably in my 30's before this dawned on me, or more truthfully, when I actually gave it thought for the first time ever. Not mind boggling stuff, but there it is - acknowledgement that I'm slow on historical time references.

Doris Lessing in "Love, Again" wrote of compression of historical time, allowing me to collapse all of time and its historical eras into more manageable time chunks. The passage:

"Somewhere about middle age, it occurs to most people that a century is only their own lifetime twice. On that thought, all of history rushes together, and now they live inside the story of time instead of looking at it from outside as observers. Only ten or twelve of their lifetimes ago, Shakespeare was alive. The French Revolution was just the other day. A hundred years ago, not much more, was the Civil War. It had seemed in another epoch, almost another dimension of time or of space. But once you have said, "a hundred years is my lifetime twice," you feel as if you could have been on those battlefields or nursing those soldiers. With Walt Whitman perhaps."

Reading those words I actually did experience that rushing of years, compacting themselves into something more reachable, more graspable. Just four "grandmothers" ago (assuming they all lived to be 90ish) Shakespeare walked the earth. He just comes whooshing forward out of the textbooks, out of the dark "way back then somewhen", and plops into someone I could almost reach out and touch. Fascinating. We're all closer than we realize and time is such an odd thing.

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Quote of the day: We stood out like three banjos at a funeral. Jenny Colgan - "Talking to Addison"
Chosen because it made me laugh out loud. '...three banjos at a funeral.' Can you imagine any two things so beautifully unmatchy? Fabulous.