HISTORY

Cole, Thomas. The Course of Empire: Desolation. 1836.

If I had to explain my tastes in music, I think I would start autobiographically, recounting certain pivotal moments where I stumbled into something special. Sneaking away with my high school girlfriend to see Beta Band and Radiohead play Grant Park in August 2001. Hearing my first Fugazi song on a cassette mixtape from that same girlfriend. Seeing Sleater-Kinney play the Metro after I moved to Chicago not long after. Or, if I were to rewind the tape, being in junior high and not able to sleep one night and turning my radio to Planet 93.5—the Quad City’s late great alternative radio station—to hear a live show by the Champaign band Hum. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was hungry for some big droney space-metal indie-rock and Hum gave me just what I wanted. The first song they played on the show was their modest midwest hit Stars and I remember thinking, when that wall of sound hit after that sheepish lone-guitar intro, that I had discovered something new. I shared the band with all my friends, we poured over their back catalog, I got some merch from a Parasol Records mail order mini-catalogue, and I kept searching for obscure music that would deliver a specific something that I didn’t know I needed.  

This memory is a positive one. However, I am not brought to this memory now because I’m thinking about music. I’m brought to this memory because I’m thinking about time. I’ll still listen to Hum as an adult (their 2020 reunion album Inlet is quite good) and feel like there is a direct connection between the kind of dense, distorted shoe-gazey sci-fi rock that Hum was making and some of the new music that I like today, music that is being created by actual young people. In other words, Hum seems near to me, relevant and as listenable as anything else. 

But when you do the math, you find that the album that included the song Stars—their near-perfect sophomore release You’d Prefer and Astronaut—came out in 1995.

The distance from now to 1995 is the same distance from 1995 to 1964—31 years. In 1964, Louie Armstrong was still putting out Billboard charting hits and the Beatles were still virginal pop-stars wanting merely to hold your hand.

While I know this is a universal phenomenon (by which I mean aging), I still find this fact baffling. Surely, the time between Roy Orbison’s croony “Oh, Pretty Woman” and Hum’s glorious wall of lo-fi distortion was massive. At least much more massive than the time between my teenage self and my current self. 

Surely.

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This all feels like a modern phenomenon to me.

When I look back at the distance between now and 1964, I fill that time with a series of progressions. I can imagine technology transforming like an evolving organism from transistor radios to smartphones; fashion morphing from one strange cut to the next, the cuffs of jeans expanding and contracting over the years like opening and closing umbrellas; or American cities growing taller and denser over time, shooting up in orderly bursts like shiny crystalline structures. Time, from my modern point of view, is all about advancement, growth, change. I can also, relatedly, organize that time as a series of certain historical steps. I can easily tell myself a story of those sixty-two years through eleven presidents sitting for a total of seventeen terms, or sixteen summer olympics in fifteen different cities, or ten different Batmans in eighteen different motion pictures. And all of these progressions are framed around these tidy socially-accepted chunks of time: decades and generations.  You have the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s; Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z and Alphas. While these categorizations are clumsy labels, we can all think up ways in which each of these groups are distinct from each other. 

This is how time works for us. It is defined by constant change and evolution. Life is a constant reminder that the worlds of our childhoods are irrevocably lost. Hell, the world of five years ago is irrevocably lost to us. We are always walking into an unknown, thrust forever into a new future, rendering the past a foriegn land. 

It seems that it wasn’t always like this.  

You can call this understanding of history—the notion that there was a past that was distinct in specific ways from the present—as a historical consciousness. Historical researchers Maria Grever and Robbert-Jan Adriaansen write about (and critique) how we think about historical consciousness. They summarize one popular concept of historical consciousness as something that “emerged as a collective mentality closely linked to the rise of modernity and what has been called the ‘acceleration of history’.” When culture and technology began to develop more quickly in the 18th Century, and then social changes became more frequent and more dramatic, only then did people start to think of history as “a holistic process of progress aimed at an unknown, open future.”  

Before this time, culture and technology and governments largely stayed the same, especially when seen through the eyes of a generation. A kid born in, say, the fourteenth century in the Kingdom of Bohemia could reasonably expect that their life would be largely similar to their parents’ lives. In those two decades that a parent would spend leading their children to adulthood, nobody’s job would become obsolete through technological advancement, very few governing bodies would dramatically shift in substance or style, none of the young people would decide to start wearing totally different clothes and listening to shockingly different music. There were no quintessential 1390s cultural trends that were reacting in opposition to 1380s cultural trends. The world was slower, so much so that history wasn’t even conceptualized as a progression. “The present,” Grever and Adriaansen write, “was seen as a continuation of the past, and changes were interpreted as temporary disturbances of the natural state.”

(Importantly, Grever and Adriaansen argue that this is just one paradigm through which to understand a historical consciousness, and not necessarily the right one. They go on to argue that there is a second paradigm that comes not from the collective mind being transformed by its own new speed of change, but from the individual. The individual thinker—in any time period—can come to understand that previous generations are separate and distinct and have their own values and worldviews, and that to understand their history, you cannot see them only through the lens of your values and worldview. This consciousness is available to anyone, not just modern thinkers and not just Western thinkers who love to think of the Renaissance as the beginning of culture. However, they are critical of this paradigm too because it still is used to endorse a very Western definition of what “historical consciousness” looks like. At least, I think that’s what they are saying. They lost me a few times. They are very smart.) 

Despite much of Grever and Andriaansen’s work being over my head, I’m still struck by the idea of a time when stasis was to be expected. As someone stuck in our current whiplashy moment of historical change, I can’t quite decide how I feel about such an orientation to life. I suspect that stasis is easier for us to wrap our human brains around, mostly because we’re not doing so good embracing the whiplash.

In fact, I think a lot of political angst comes from us misunderstanding points in the whiplash as stasis. When we pine for a time when you could buy a house and raise a family on one good union job salary, we feel like we are pining for an old stasis that was taken from us, but really we’re just pining for something that was available to one generation in one specific post-war context. We are mistaking the accident of history—a tiny blip in the scheme of things—for stasis we can and should return to. Really, we have no idea what stasis is, we are so far removed—by technology and World Wars and pop songs—from anything like it.  

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Grever and Andriaansen offer a third paradigm for cultivating a historical consciousness that they borrow from the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. It seems like Gadamer’s whole thing was hermeneutics—how we interpret texts—and how we always bring ourselves into our interpretation. He believes we all have our own “horizons,” which I’m interpreting as a social-historical context that we can’t escape, a context for making meaning, and true understanding of a text comes from a “fusion of horizons.” This fusion creates a new context for meaning that exists in between you and the text and acknowledges and incorporates both horizons. When you understand this process, that your own situatedness, the historical air you breathe, is an inescapable lens that colors everything you see, a lens you cannot shed, and that you have to look for that other lens in the text you’re interpreting so that you can meld the two, then you have arrived at a state of understanding he calls “historically effected consciousness”. 

Is this where feelings of weirdness when thinking about history come from, an underdeveloped “historically effected consciousness”? I imagine us as historical thinkers on the ledge of an impossibly high mountain. Above us is an infinite climb, shrouded in fog and unknowable. But below us is a whole landscape, all the history, spread out in space, that preceded our climb to the ledge. From our high perch in modernity, where we must constantly subdivide the historical landscape into eras and periods and milestones and movements, do we get a little vertigo when the borders don’t always organize things as they should? Does the being on the high ledge actually distort our perception of the landscape?

Perhaps my problem is not that I connect my teenage music too closely to the present but that I push the hits of 1964 too far away. I can never hear “I Want to Hold Your Hand” with fresh ears because all I hear are decades of songs that were influenced by those early Beatles hits, so much that they make the original seem flat by comparison. I don’t quite get how “Pretty Woman” was narratively and sonically novel, but also popular because it was an American rock hit that audiences were still clinging to as the British Invasion was about to hit its peak. I don’t feel all that context because my horizon positions those songs as the safe radio hits that are played in childhood, on family speakers and in movie trailers.   

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There is a concept in medieval literature called mundus senescit. Roughly translated from Latin, it means, “the world has grown old.” It was a pessimistic belief about the world, a feeling that it was in its dying stages.

        This belief was connected to ideas about the apocalypse and the second coming of Christ. It was a different flavour of end-of-the-world fascination than what we have now. This was a fear that the world had gone stagnant. The violence, the suffering, the disease that people saw around them in feudal Europe felt like an age of decay. Surely, some assumed, the end times were near.

There is something about this idea that I find charming and surprising, that someone could look around Europe at any time in the first dozen centuries of the common era and think that it was the end of the story. However, it mostly surprises me because I set it up against our own apocalyptic fetishes. 

There are similarities. We have nuclear dread and climate change despair. They had plagues and New Testament imagery. I wonder if medieval thinkers took the same comfort in their end-of-the-world visions as we do in our zombie movies and dystopian book series. I wonder if Gen Z in their own version of mundus senescit?

It’s fun to dream about, but I don’t think I’ll ever totally understand that medieval historical perspective without devoting my remaining years to that scholarship, and even then, it’ll only be speculation. That horizon that is cut off to me, a foreign land, as the past always is.

But the takeaway is that people of long ago did not place themselves in the continuum that I do. They too saw themselves on the highest ledge, at the pinnacle of human achievement, thinking in their own way about the vast expanse of activity that came before. Why couldn’t they be witnessing the end of the world?

That thought helps me put our current age into a perspective that I enjoy. Because even though we can't see them, on the mountain of time, there are countless ledges above us. There is a comfort in knowing that someone in the far future will sit on their ledge and wonder about our present—this early millenium—with equal imprecision. They will conflate certain things and not quite understand the precise sequence of events. They will organize our era into sections that we, in the middle of the action, don’t see the borders of. They will mischaracterize us, maybe reading one novel from this time that some future critic will say is a “definitive” portrayal of the age, and in doing that, they will ignore huge swaths of us and reduce the rest of us to an archetype. They will see us through their own lens, and interpret us for their own purposes. They will get plenty wrong and come to the wrong conclusions, and we won’t be able to correct them. We will be just one shadowy village that they see from their incredible height, a curious speck in a vast historical landscape. We will be their foreign country, and when they think of our lives, the best they will be able to do is wonder. 

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References:

Cole, Thomas. The Course of Empire: Desolation. 1836, oil on canvas, New-York Historical Society, New York. Wikimedia Commons, commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cole_Thomas_The_Course_of_Empire_Desolation_1836.jpg.

Grever, Maria, and Robbert-Jan Adriaansen. 2019. “Historical Consciousness: The Enigma of Different Paradigms.” Journal of Curriculum Studies 51 (6): 814–30. doi:10.1080/00220272.2019.1652937.

Malpas, Jeff, "Hans-Georg Gadamer", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2025 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2025/entries/gadamer/>.

Marnell, Blair. "All the Batman actors in order." 2024. Digital Trends, https://www.digitaltrends.com/movies/all-the-batman-actors-in-order/.

Wiemann, Dirk. "Mundus Senescit: Is Tolkien's Medievalism Victorian or Modernist?" Hither Shore: Journal of Modern Fantasy, vol. 8, 2012, pp. 24-38. ResearchGate, www.researchgate.net/publication/316164477_Mundus_senescit_is_Tolkien's_Medievalism_Victorian_or_Modernist.

Media: 

Consider accompanying your reading with Hum's quasi-hit song Stars from 1995's fantastic album You'd Prefer An Astronaut:

Here's a classic video about time illusions from Vsauce that I ripped off for my intro that led me to Grever and Andriaansen: