100 Posts in 100 Days: Day 59
Feb. 28th, 2012 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zolaI have a small stack of Ace Doubles that I somehow never got around to reading. They're the Sci-Fi/Fantasy variety.
I've been having a blast, because most of them are golden-age old-fashioned pulp. There was a really decent sci-fi horror called Pictures of Pavanne, and there's a bunch of Darkover novels in there.
The one I'm working on now has two stories by Murray Leinster. I've enjoyed books of his before, but this one, "The Pirates of Zan", had a really great comment in it:
"Do you realize," he asked, "that the whole purpose of civilization is to take the surprises out of life, so one can be bored to death? That a culture in which nothing unexpected ever happens is in what is called its 'golden age'? That when nobody can even imagine anything happening unexpectedly, that they later fondly refer to that period as the 'good old days'?
I thought on this after I stopped laughing, and in many ways, it's nothing less than the truth. Maybe that's why there are so many conservative politicians who seem to want to turn the clock back to the fifties, a time that seems simpler, more predictable and less complicated.
The problem is you can't go back. Visit your hometown 20 years after you leave it, and it's changed. Even if the storefronts are the same, the businesses have changed. People have died or moved away, and new people have been born or moved in. Customs change, the language changes, life changes.
Life is a balancing act, where, if you aren't careful, comfort can become stagnation and habit can become so ingrained that it's painful to give it up. Maybe that's the real secret of people who grow old gracefully--they don't give up their capacity to embrace change.
I wonder what life will look like 20 years from now?
I've been having a blast, because most of them are golden-age old-fashioned pulp. There was a really decent sci-fi horror called Pictures of Pavanne, and there's a bunch of Darkover novels in there.
The one I'm working on now has two stories by Murray Leinster. I've enjoyed books of his before, but this one, "The Pirates of Zan", had a really great comment in it:
"Do you realize," he asked, "that the whole purpose of civilization is to take the surprises out of life, so one can be bored to death? That a culture in which nothing unexpected ever happens is in what is called its 'golden age'? That when nobody can even imagine anything happening unexpectedly, that they later fondly refer to that period as the 'good old days'?
I thought on this after I stopped laughing, and in many ways, it's nothing less than the truth. Maybe that's why there are so many conservative politicians who seem to want to turn the clock back to the fifties, a time that seems simpler, more predictable and less complicated.
The problem is you can't go back. Visit your hometown 20 years after you leave it, and it's changed. Even if the storefronts are the same, the businesses have changed. People have died or moved away, and new people have been born or moved in. Customs change, the language changes, life changes.
Life is a balancing act, where, if you aren't careful, comfort can become stagnation and habit can become so ingrained that it's painful to give it up. Maybe that's the real secret of people who grow old gracefully--they don't give up their capacity to embrace change.
I wonder what life will look like 20 years from now?
