What Fragile, Short-Lived Things Are Humans

In 1938, on the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, they had a reunion of surviving veterans on the battlefield ...

All I can think of as I watch this is: Imagine, meeting living people with active memories of the Civil War.

It's sort of like the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game or the equivalent in life (more or less debunked since, as best articulated by Malcolm Gladwell in his fascinating book The Tipping Point, where he explains that the whole small world aspect of it is ruined by the fact that a certain, smallish number of people create nodes by knowing A LOT of people), the idea of being just one step away from the actual experience of the Civil War.  Or maybe the Gettysburg Address:

But then it makes me think: Something like the Civil War or the American Revolution seem so distant and out of reach at 150 or 200-some-odd years away, but it's really not that far.  My father could have had a conversation with those men when he was nearly an adult (he was 16 in 1938), and now he is older, at 91, than many of them were at that reunion.

Which leads to a second thought: This coming June (2014) is the 70th anniversary of D-Day.  Our World War II veterans (my father served in the Army Air Corps after being drafted) are as old now as those men were then.  World War II, though something I didn't experience, is still something with which I am familiar, the last Big War, the thing that all my friends' parents and grandparents talked about.  It was still close enough to touch.

Is that how my parents saw the Civil War?  I mean, James Thurber, for example, often references his grandfather as a Civil War vet, but I took that sort of distantly -- I read Thurber's work as an artifact itself from the 30s, and it was after all his grandfather, and old man in a past time.  But this makes it all much more immediate, like I walked into a room just after the old guy stepped out.

The scene from Thurber's story about "The Day the Dam Broke."

And here's the thing: we haven't been around that long.  Put simply, it's only been about 200,000 years.  Yeah, that's a pretty big number, but considering the earth itself is about 4.5 billion years old ... well not much.  I mean, the dinosaurs were here for over 100 million years.  That's about five-hundred times longer than we've been so far.  And we can reach back with any reasonable certainty only, what, about 3,000 or 4,000 years?  What's that: a millisecond relatively?

Now in human terms, it's an eternity.  Figuring the Biblical three-score ten as an easy lifespan, that's around 43 generations, laid end to end.  (Probably twice that, if you figure reproduction between 20 and 35 years old for each one, but one could expect to be able to talk directly to one's grandparents, so this seems a simple way to do the math.)  Michael Barone figures that you can divide US history at least into 76-year increments, as a friend pointed out in his blog.  "We are as far away in time today from passage of the Social Security in 1935," Barone explains, "as Americans then were from the launching of post-Civil War Reconstruction."  Each 76-year period, he says, represents the development of a mode of governing or approaching societal organization, its effective use, and then its dissolution.

Forty-three generations then, and we lose contact with actual experience in around four generations (can you summon up the experiences of your great grandfather?) and start to lose any information about things not long after (in around 300 years or so?)  We have archeologists to figure out what the Egyptians did because we forgot, and no one asked grandpa.

Which brings me back to the idea of being able to actually converse with a veteran of the Civil War, and how that compares with our veterans today.  I often tell people that they need to save their stories, and they dismiss the thought by saying they're "nobody," but that's the very thing.  Letting these simple stories go, losing the actual experience is how we forget what a time was like ...