Something Good #68: Once in a Lifetime
I have nothing to say about the Queen, but I haven’t been able to shake an observation I heard on a history podcast I listened to a few days after her death: that her first Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and her last, Liz Truss, were born a century apart. A human being who until a few days ago was still very much alive, had spent quality time with a man who had been present at a cavalry charge in 1898. It’s hard to not feel a bit of temporal vertigo at this three-century overlap.
The ancients had a concept, called saeculum in Latin, that was meant to denote both a generation and an era. When the span was defined, it was usually about the length of what we now call a century (which is why we call them siècles in French). But originally, it had a more evocative meaning—the time from when something significant began (a city, a civilization, the consecration of a temple) until the death of the last living person to have been present at that moment. With that death came a sort of turning-over, a renewal. A completed cycle.
The Romans celebrated the beginning of a new saeculum with a festival, the ludi saeculares. It was very literally a once-in-a-lifetime event. From A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1875): “Some days before they commenced, heralds were sent about to invite the people to a spectacle which no one had ever beheld, and which no one would ever behold again.” There’s no modern-day equivalent, besides astronomical actors out of our control like Halley’s Comet, to predetermined once-a-generation events like this.
You come across this fascination with life-as-unit-of-time again and again in the ancient world. It is a key driver of early Christian thought and practice. Didn’t Jesus says of the end of days, “This generation will not pass away until all these things be done,” putting a hard deadline on his promises?
Now, from two thousand years later, this is a… pretty refutable claim. Even C.S. Lewis called “certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible,” a startling burn, but its hard to imagine Christianity without that idea of immanence—it certainly inspired the extremely apocalyptic outlook of early Christianity and probably more than a few martyrs, who could be assured of a timely resurrection. Tom Holland, in his excellent Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, details how this thinking evolved, and how the word secular, derived of course from saeculum, came to refer to the living, finite world as we know it, in which the apocalypse hasn’t happened yet.
There have been countless spins on this “any day now…” belief over the centuries, like the early Jehovah’s Witness belief that God’s final judgment would occur before the generation that had witnessed the horrors of 1914 had passed away (also refuted).
The idea of defining chapters in history by lifetimes is foreign to us, probably because we live in an age where the world can change, or at least seem to change irrevocably multiple times in a single lifetime.
The late Queen, in a very real sense, had a foot in both the Victorian Age and, I don’t know… TikTok, or whatever phenomenon you want to sub in for whatever the hell is going on right now. There’s something hard to shake about having shared the Earth with such a big-time overlapper like Elizabeth II. We’re all linked to the ancient, unknowable past by these overlaps, though they’re not all that dramatic or long-reaching. Cycles are constantly turning over without us even realizing it.
My paternal grandmother was born in St. Petersburg in 1910, and towards the end of her life, she had a Russian caregiver who told us that the Russian she could still speak was a 19th-Century form of the language, a way way of speaking that would have once been common in the Empire, but that would have been swept away by the language reforms of the Revolution, barely whispered for nearly a century.
There was a day in time when the last eyes to see Christ were closed forever. The battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with the death of some one man. What will die with me when I die? What pathetic or frail form will the world lose? Perhaps the voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a horse in the vacant space at Serrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?
— Jorge Luis Borges, “The Witness”
Like many of you, I’m sure, I’ve been playing around with the various A.I.-powered image generators proliferating on the web these days. I generated this image with one called DreamStudio, and I found it weirdly affecting that the poor thing tried to replicate a Getty Images watermark on the picture, as if it had seen so many of them in its training that it thought that’s what we humans like.
I was reminded of something Nabokov once wrote about the genesis of Lolita: “As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.”
I have a question for you. T-shirts?
As in, would you be interested if I were to whip up some Something Good merchandise?
This newsletter is, and will probably always remain, a free, money-losing enterprise, but I have had the thought that readers might support it by buying interesting or attractive merchandise with which to adorn their frames. I just have no idea if anybody will be interested. TO THAT END, I have prepared a short, three-question survey for you, the reader, which would be very helpful to me if you could take a second to fill out. Even, and perhaps especially, if you have no interest in this endeavour, your input would be very helpful.
This issue’s #nojacketsrequired comes courtesy of reader Jane Davis. As always, I am happy to accept your dejacketed discoveries. Email them to me at [email protected] directly, as if you just reply to this newsletter the attachment won’t come through.
You Can Live Forever continues to screen around the world! Tomorrow we play Halifax, and Sudbury, Calgary and Vancouver are just around the corner. Outside of Canada, we’ll be screening at the Hong Kong Lesbian & Gay Film Festival three times, starting on September 18; the Love & Pride Film Festival in Singapore on October 7, the Seattle Queer Film Festival on October 23, and lots more we can’t announce yet.
If you want to keep up-to-date, our Instagram is probably the best account to follow.
I am striving to bring you at least one issue of Something Good a month these days. Lots of exciting issues lined up of which I can not yet speak. If you like what you read here, though, please subscribe below or tell a friend.
Bonus track:
