Well, most of the responses are pretty much as I would have expected and
largely the kinds of things I was thinking myself. But, if youll forgive
me getting a bit metaphysical, one way to look at this is to say that
everything is the past (or the future), in that the present is
effectively of infinitesimal duration. We experience it, as William
James and later Bergson said, as a stream of consciousness. Indeed some
psychologists argue that given the slow speed of nerve impulses we are
always experiencing things that have already happened.
It seems to me that the evidence we have decays away exponentially from
the wave of the present. My cup of tea rapidly degrades into some
chemicals in my gut and a few tealeaves in the compost bin.
I must admit, perhaps because I am a prehistorian by background, that
the historical aspect that Dan mentions, still bothers me. So much of
what I seem to be doing is source criticism of historical documetation.
Where this gets a bit weird is that I find myself increasingly using
newspaper archives because the events I'm interested in are to recent to
have generated a more "solid" history. Equally theres the internet stuff
which has even more of a feel of ephemerality about it e.g. its
interesting that people are starting to include a date accessed when
refering to materials from the internet.
Nevertheless, the saving grace of being interested in material culture,
in my experience, is that it often gives a solid ground to things within
the chaos of other information. Whatever people say about events the
artefacts have at least sufficient permanence for one to measure their
assertions against them. If that makes any sense.
P G-B
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