The way we experience history and time in all its forms shifted quite massively between 1989 and 2001 - to the point where contrivances like decades are now kind of silly.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
We live in a world which is changing very fast. What seems contemporary now will be historical in two years.
The hallmark of our times is change and acceleration, but we have to provide the history.
When our culture shifts, it tends to overcorrect, throwing out everything associated with an era we've moved past, rather than saving what was good and combining it with what is new.
American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe.
The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects - making it possible... to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.
Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can't do, fear or even disgust at growing old.
Probably people always feel that they are living in a time of transition, but we can hardly be mistaken perhaps in thinking that this is an era of particularly momentous change, rapid and proceeding at an ever quickening rate.
I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms. In America, possibly because of whatever the American dream is, this happens over and over again. These eras repeat.
It is clear that when you write a story that takes place in the past, you try to show what really happened in those times. But you are always moved by the suspicion that you are also showing something about our contemporary world.
I've never been nostalgic, personally or politically - if the past was so great, how come it's history?
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