...Like Flies

The latest to die was Thomas Disch. He was one of the new wave of the 60's, more literary than many science fiction writers had been, also, more scatalogical. I didn't care that much for what he wrote. As for his more recent fiction and poetry, I cannot comment at all, as I have not read it. Still I hated to read that he was dead - but for purely selfish reasons. The giants I grew up with all are gone - Heinlein, Clarke, Asimov and the rest. I remember reading John Campbell's obit in Analog many years ago. This is part of growing old. People - not relatives or friends, but cultural touchstones - one is comfortable and familiar with grow old as well, and then they die. Or you see a picture of them as old, bent, wrinkled octogenarians and the shock of seeing that ancient face, that face which has buried somewhere within it just a hint of the youthful, ageless man or woman you remember, causes you to pull up short and contemplate just how little time we get.

Photos have only been around for about 200 years. Moving pictures, maybe 100 or so. Television a scant sixty. Yet these things let us see the past with that most vital of senses, they let us look into Lincoln's eyes, or watch Armstrong step on the moon for all mankind. Imagine what it may be like several hundred years hence. Imagine if we had movies of the Revolutionary War, of the first circumnavigation of the globe, of the pyramids being built...

Too much nostalgia, too much living in the past, is unhealthy. But it doesn't hurt to remember that, regardless of the world of physics, time flows for us in only one direction.