I don't know! I've always been attracted to old things, especially if they were originally meant to be sort of ephemeral or "cutting edge." I have to make a concerted effort not to collect middle-management inspiration books Through the Ages and early guides to the Information Superhighway (I do have a 1994 Internet Yellow Pages that I love).
I'm not sure what it is, exactly. Probably something very simple and unexamined, like "the combination of mutability and permanence." You wrote a book about the present, for the present, but here I am reading it forty years later! I don't know why that perfectly ordinary experience should be so satisfying, but sometimes it is. Right now I have a lot of anxieties about an uncertain future, for perfectly rational reasons. Here are some people who also couldn't see what was ahead (witness this obviously dated theorizing! observe these hopeful but unfounded predictions!) but here we all are anyway. I like to imagine that in twenty or sixty years there will be someone to look back on us and think, "Well, they're all doing their best, but it's so extremely of its time, poor things." The circle of life? Is that it? I'm not sure. I think it's probably a bunch of things and that's one of them. I have a fellow-feeling for anything dated because I am aware of my own imminent datedness. Or live in hope of it. Or something.
I like to have a sense of the range of opinions available on any given topic at different times, because that's something that tends to get informally collapsed and simplified over time. I also just like seeing how ordinary things looked and worked. Even if I was alive at the time, it's too easy for everything to get mixed up and elided in my memory. That's one of the reasons I love murder mysteries: they wind up paying more attention to daily mechanical things like "how to make a phone call" than other kinds of fiction. Murder mysteries and Proust.
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timeasmymeasure
RE: Re: dated data
Date: 2017-03-06 02:07 pm (UTC)I'm not sure what it is, exactly. Probably something very simple and unexamined, like "the combination of mutability and permanence." You wrote a book about the present, for the present, but here I am reading it forty years later! I don't know why that perfectly ordinary experience should be so satisfying, but sometimes it is. Right now I have a lot of anxieties about an uncertain future, for perfectly rational reasons. Here are some people who also couldn't see what was ahead (witness this obviously dated theorizing! observe these hopeful but unfounded predictions!) but here we all are anyway. I like to imagine that in twenty or sixty years there will be someone to look back on us and think, "Well, they're all doing their best, but it's so extremely of its time, poor things." The circle of life? Is that it? I'm not sure. I think it's probably a bunch of things and that's one of them. I have a fellow-feeling for anything dated because I am aware of my own imminent datedness. Or live in hope of it. Or something.
I like to have a sense of the range of opinions available on any given topic at different times, because that's something that tends to get informally collapsed and simplified over time. I also just like seeing how ordinary things looked and worked. Even if I was alive at the time, it's too easy for everything to get mixed up and elided in my memory. That's one of the reasons I love murder mysteries: they wind up paying more attention to daily mechanical things like "how to make a phone call" than other kinds of fiction. Murder mysteries and Proust.
Sorry if this reply is way too long!