Jerome has said the ultimate thing about antiquity. I don't have anything better than that, nor can I add anything to what he has already said:
Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.
Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?
Year 2000 and odd!!! How funny it seems today, but whatever Jerome said is so very true. Arnab got a 1955 Kodak camera last weekend and we were marvelling over it. What would those people who actually used these cameras say about our recent DSLRs? Those people who had telephones without dials and had to ask a telephone operator to connect them to somewhere? Will they look at my BlackBerry Z10 with wide eyes? How funny that we can't even imagine our lives without stuff which were non-existent just a few decades back.
Going to the other end of the scale, how would this very Z10 model look after fifty years? I think teenagers or college students would say, "haha, look at that! You had to actually drag the text and flip it on to the email! Poor millennial people, they had to live with that?" The antiques of today are the cheap trifles of yesterday and the most marveled at new invention of today will become an article, may be cherished but totally unused when tomorrow dawns....
Just a thought... we humans live in our little bubbles of space and time and think how smart we are. Yes, we are smart, but we show off a lot more than what we actually are :)
Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried.
Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?
[Source: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?pageno=39&fk_files=1881315]
Year 2000 and odd!!! How funny it seems today, but whatever Jerome said is so very true. Arnab got a 1955 Kodak camera last weekend and we were marvelling over it. What would those people who actually used these cameras say about our recent DSLRs? Those people who had telephones without dials and had to ask a telephone operator to connect them to somewhere? Will they look at my BlackBerry Z10 with wide eyes? How funny that we can't even imagine our lives without stuff which were non-existent just a few decades back.
Going to the other end of the scale, how would this very Z10 model look after fifty years? I think teenagers or college students would say, "haha, look at that! You had to actually drag the text and flip it on to the email! Poor millennial people, they had to live with that?" The antiques of today are the cheap trifles of yesterday and the most marveled at new invention of today will become an article, may be cherished but totally unused when tomorrow dawns....
Just a thought... we humans live in our little bubbles of space and time and think how smart we are. Yes, we are smart, but we show off a lot more than what we actually are :)
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