The Good Old Days

Saw the latest Woody Allen project last night, and although Midnight In Paris is not Annie Hall or Manhattan, it does work around an interesting premises. Allen explores what I will call the myth of the golden age. As a high school teacher, this myth presents itself to me almost daily. The students are mostly sure that they and their generation are just fine; the adults are mostly convinced that this new wave of students will surely mark the end of progress, science, and perhaps even life as we know it and thus long for days of yore. 

             

Like most of us, I too sometimes think that living in some foregone era would have been better. I imagine posing as a hipster with Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassidy, and the Beats back in Time Square in the late 40s. 

I think about how cool it would be to be in Paris with Hemingway and Picasso’s Lost Generation of the 20s. I 

wonder about walking up to Walden Pond and having a chat with good ol’ Thoreau. I’m sure we all have eras we

idealize as a golden age. Perhaps as we age, it is even a time from our own lives that seemed more stable, or more authentic, or more exciting. Probably we go back to when we were young and just starting out. Remember before computers? and cable TV? and DVRs? and VCRs? and video games? Oh how glorious it was. Folks sat on their front porches and sipped real lemonade, and kids ran around the yards in happy childhood bliss. But as Gil realizes in Allen’s work, the myth of the golden age is just that, a myth. Ironically, the Beats thought that there was a time before them that was “golden.” The Lost Generation romanticized a previous era. And we must assume that those folks sipping lemonade on their front porches were fairly sure that the kids of their day would not amount to a hill of beans; that way back then times were better, men were men, women were women. 

But then reality sets in. First, to live anytime before modern medicine would be risky at best. Break a leg and either die or limp for the rest of your life. Get TB, Polio, the plague, you name it. Live anytime before modern refrigeration and try to store food. We can do it, but we’re going to spend the majority of our day on it. Live before phones and I can’t talk to my sister in Detroit. You get the point, but maybe this isn’t the point. Maybe it is not the old technology and medicine and food that we long for, but the old sensibilities and values. Those old values scare me though. I think of racism, bigotry, religious intolerance, sexual repression, domestic violence, child abuse, etc., and I like to believe we are at least slightly better than we used to be.

Anyway, this is a mute point, isn’t it? We cannot go back. Even if the past were better, we are not permitted to return. We move forward. This is our fate. As Fitzgerald wrote, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." We live in the present and look toward the future. The more we fight against it, the more we become sour, grumpy, luddites and mostly irrelevant. 

So here are two lines from Woody Allen that have nothing to do with my point today, but I like them.

I am not afraid of death, I just don't want to be there when it happens. 

Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon.