I experience a similar phenomenon on a much smaller scale when I read the diaries of Henry "Plupy" Shute. The first is "The Real Diary of a Real Boy." It is a book published in 1902, now out of print but readily found at antiquarian book fairs (at least in this area), which is basically the diary of the misadventures of a kid in 1860s Exeter, New Hampshire. So the introduction goes, the guy was going through some old childhood things, found his old diaries, and published them. I suspect they're probably doctored a bit, but they're hilarious and also drive home how much cooler it must have been to be a kid back then, when kids could get themselves into ridiculous amounts of trouble but somehow never really seriously hurt anything or got hurt themselves -- unlike today, where a kid with a sparkler gets lots of paranoid people into court. It's basically the 19th century version of Radebur, actually -- the spelling is that good. Except the guy grows up to be a judge, whereas Radebur does not grow up at all.

At any rate, although the 1860s is HARDLY comparably distant as the days of Socrates, the idea is the same. When I read those diaries, history shrinks. Unless I misremember, my grandparents knew someone who knew Henry Shute, and, just like that, the Civil War is connected to me through a short, traceable chain, instead of some vague, unknown passage of many years. Suddenly the Civil War no longer seems like an event that occurred over half our country's history ago but something I just barely missed.

So then I project out into the future. Say I live to be 75. Well, the people that are 75 today are seeing what is an incredible age even for people *my* age. We have the Internet, instant communication, and technology so cheap that kids can make movies, music, and web sites with better effects than *anybody* could twenty or thirty years ago. But 75 years ago, cars were newer than computers are today. Any major city looked radically different. The world looked radically different. 75 years before that, the world was different but less so, and 75 years before that, it wasn't so different at all. Change seems to speed up as we go, or at least that's what it's doing now.

So I can't even imagine what changes I'll see in this world before I die. The world is already considerably different since I was born.

Then when I jump from these musings, covering not even a couple hundred years, to yours, I am overwhelmed.