My generation has grown up with low-resolution television and video in general, but it has consistently gotten better as we aged. This has, in me at least, led to a feeling that we live in another time.

It seems like our time is different. Like our time is in high-res. When, in reality, in essence, there is no difference between now and thirty years ago. People didn’t have low-res vision, they experienced the world exactly as we are experiencing it now. It is some sort of illusion to think that, were a modern human living in a modern society to be magically driven back in time 55 years, to 1970, that they would notice anything different.

Here’s a poem I wrote. I think it’s one of my favourite poems that I’ve ever written.

The Traveler

When he looked at the place where his favourite tree had been
And when, here, he laid down, watching the clouds passing through
The grass was the same warm, hairy green
The morning sky the same cold, airy blue

His eyes just as keen as when he was old
His knees no more sore than when they were new
If only he could see that tree as it had been, grown ten-fold
If only he could go back, if only people knew

Of course, the difference in technology, styles and trends would quite quickly be noticed. Just as the different actualities and events. But in essence, in its core, life wouldn’t feel any different. Why is it that one would think the opposite? Is it actually because of the development of screens and their always-improving resolutions, or is it something more fundamental? Perhaps something inherent in aging and reflecting back on different times?

Maybe the answer unravels when we get older, for when we think back twenty years in our own lives, we don’t think in a lesser resolution, do we? We were there, living and experiencing the time that would eventually become memory. It didn’t feel any different then, just as it doesn’t feel any different now. Or does it? As I write this, replacing myself in my twelve-year-old self, it does feel like a memory. A thing that was whole when it was in the present but lost something on the way to the future, on its way to me doing my best to remember.

This reminds me of a quote out of “The Brothers Karamazov”:

“Images from this kind may be recalled (and this is no secret) from a yet earlier age, as far back as the age of two, but in such a manner that they emerge all one’s life only as bright points in the dark, like a tiny corner torn from an enormous picture which has all faded and disappeared, apart from that one little corner”

Perhaps we learn now that this quality is not simply because we grew up in a time of great technological innovation, but because our memories simply fade as we age. They remain bright, but they fade. And knowing nothing else of memories, we assume they fade in the mind of another too. And thus our entire picture of a time in which we were never alive is a faded version of reality. One in a lower resolution than we experience in the present. Makes me want to live in the moment.