The late 19th century

March 11th, 2023

The passage of time has no meaning to me. It is completely immaterial and at worst — a minor inconvenience. I am aware of it of course, and the damned mirrors are the main culprits of it. But it has no influence on me. The past that is still vibrantly alive for me or fragments of the past at least. And it is not just an academic study of what was forgotten, it is rather an ongoing process of remembering.

There are whole periods of past time, usually neatly framed between particular years and given a period name by mere historians, that never ended for me, despite the current date. I still consider them as concurrent to the day today, still very much open to a carnal touch of personal experience. One of those periods is the time of the late 19th century — say from about the 1870s to 1914.

It is rare for a century to end on the exact calendar year for that specific century. That is the case for the 19th century which ended not on December 31st, 1900 but the moment Gavrlio Princip fired shots at Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in August of 1914 (it is the case for the 20th century as well — which ended on September 11th, 2001). Of course, those are my nominal century-time definitions only.

Historians and cultural academics came up with names for this period based on geographical locations — for the USA that is called “the Gilded Age”, for Britain it is “Victorian Era”, for most of the rest of the world it was “Imperialism” — especially for those on the receiving end of it. For me — it is the age of the rise and the fall of the middle class and the squandered opportunities thereof. There is no cute monicker for that.

I gave up on trying to explain to myself why somehow I feel this period of time is physically so palpable to my understanding and thinking. It just is. Every book — be it non-fiction, novels, or poems — from that era brings a wry smile to my face. I feel like I lived through it personally and I don't believe in reincarnation so I did not live through it in this certain way. But the feeling of deja-vu remains strong.

And I keep exploring it deeper and vaster with each new discovery that is not a revelation but rather an unveiling of something I already knew once. I keep reading and visiting the cities that still preserved the layout and ornamental details of that time and the tangible mementos I feel there in the air that are still as real for me as a train timetable between Lemberg and Pressburg from September 1907.

I don't know why. But that is not really important. It is something I do. And will keep on doing until I find something — an explanation? a lost memory? or an explanation of a lost memory? Rationally, I know it will never happen. I will never find it especially when I don't know what it is. No matter. Maybe I am not even trying to find anything. Maybe I am just trying to preserve something.