Only a few decades, really...

I find it very interesting that the most engaging and entertaining periods of history were actually only a decade or so in length.

For instance, I'm mesmerized by pirates, buccaneers, privateering, the whole gamut. Still, the heyday of pirates was only from 1690-1730. Even tighter (and perhaps more glamorized), my kids are enamored with the wild west. That period of gun fighting and untamed cowboys ran only from about 1860-1880 or so...only 20 years. An average individual could have easily lived through an entire epoch we so often think of as the stuff of legends.

This is just one more insight in my continuing reckoning with time. As I age, I come to see time lines as being more compact, not so unreasonable. I am coming to see generations and lives of individuals in perspective. Like seeing the populations of the world as one, as the earth being much smaller than I once imagined, I am also truncating time. The industrial revolution was something my grandfather knew of, perhaps. I will have known of the advent of mass communication, the Bomb, Bedazzlers...

I find this new vantage point to be intoxicating.