When I was a child I had a vague notion of history. I remember trying to comprehend it.  History looked like an expanse of stained and yellowing paper with a dark timeline running through the middle of it. Cars were invented sometime in the past…sometime after knights fought for kings but probably before the TV was invented. The Revolutionary War was just before the Civil War because thats how we learned it in school–not much happened between so the times became condensed in my mind. And surely it was a long long time ago that people didn’t have light bulbs, air conditioning, toilets (seriously, how did people live without toilets!), and cars. I mean, at least they had trains for a long time before cars. And telephones too.  All of this was in some grand past long dead and incomprehensible. Just a timeline.

Some quick facts. It is 2010. The personal computer did not exist thirty years ago. Schools were still segregated 50 years ago. World War 2 was some 70 years ago. The great depression was some 80 years ago, and World War 1 was about 90 years ago. Slavery existed 150 years ago.

The lightbulb was invented in 1880. Before that everyone used candles and after that it took many many years for lights to become widespread.  That was130 years ago.  Think about that for a moment. The lightbulb changed the character of our existence forever. We could go to sleep any time. We could work at night, live at night. Before, darkness was impenetrable except for our feeble attempts with fire and our prayers to the stars and moon that they would shine brighter and light our way. Now we live by the lights we have artificially created.

Right around the same time, 1885, the first widely recognized internal combustion engine was built. Again, only 125 years ago. Before that you hardly could leave you town. When you did you had to travel long distances slowly or expensively. You had to get on a horse or ride in a carriage or walk. Your neighbors were the people you knew because you couldn’t know anyone else. Think of how much time we spend in cars. Think of the places we go, with such speed and consistency. Take all that away. Only a 125 years ago. Two average lifespans. And of course automobiles weren’t even common until after Ford, in the 1900s, and didn’t become a real part of every day life until even later. Yes, we had trains before but they were still quite different. And this is saying nothing of airplanes, which allow us to travel across the world in hours instead of months or even years.

Should I speak also of telephones and the fact that before we could only talk to people whom we had traveled long distances (quite slowly) to see or had carefully written to? I won’t even mention computers. Or the thousands of other integral technologies in our lives that we don’t really notice but which readily shape our lives. Polyester. Plastic. Air conditioning. And so on.

The industrial revolution occurred around the late 1700s, with the invention of the cotton gin, steam engine, and the use of iron. It really picked up steam (no pun intended) around the 1850s. 160 years ago. How long is that for a world to completely change character? In such a sense as it has…such an extreme sense. Its incomprehensible. Life as those people knew it is gone, perhaps forever. We either find ourselves entirely unable to comprehend such an existence or completely aghast at the thought of it.

Such a short time and such change. The whole nature of our experience stands altered by what we have created.

This is, again, the sort of thing I seek to study in my life–the way that the life we have created for ourselves frames and shapes the nature of our existence. Trying to comprehend the existence of pre-1850s in nearly impossible. I was fascinated tonight by Pride and Prejudice for that reason alone, nevermind the fact that its a Jane Austen romance. The world of then is not the world of now and a mere 150 years (200 in the case of Austen) separates us from that existence. How things have changed. How all of life has changed! What is this existence that we are living now!? How absurd and how fascinating!