If you are 84 in this Post-Modern year of 2012 , while your father, who born in 1896 (at the height of the Age of Modernity) lived with his elderly grandmother (born in 1811) until 1901, there is a potential there for two centuries of direct family memories.
So you could find yourself telling your great-grandchildren, "I can remember my father telling me of hearing his grandmother recalling her early years growing up in a remote part of the Highlands in the 1810s, at the height of the Romantic Era."
I am not saying that Shirley Dawson Kirkland, eldest daughter of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, has in fact ever recounted such an account - but technically - she could have.
If Dawson's grandmother had gone further back and recounted to him what her parents or grandparents had told her of the effect upon their intellect world caused by the events of the French Revolution/end to the Age of Classicalism & Enlightenment/rise of the Age of Romanticism, we can span even more epochs and epoch changing events.
His grandmother Janet's parents and grandparents had lived through the heady transition from the Ages of Classicalism/ Enlightenment into the Age of Romanticism.
By contrast, Janet was fully a child and adult of the Age of Romanticism.
Just as Henry Dawson himself was fully a child and adult of the Age of Scientism.
But his parents, rather like his grandmother Janet's parents, were children of a time of dramatic transition - from Romanticism into Positivism.
His daughter Shirley and son Keith were teenagers in the Age of Modernity, pre-1945, but have spent the vast bulk of their lives in this Post Modern Era.
Since they were not even 15 and 17 when the Bomb dropped on Hiroshima, I would say they, also, were children of a transition period (Modernity to Post-Modernity).
Through the eyes of just this one family, we can tell one hell of a story, of epochs succeeding epochs and being succeeded in turn.
And I aim to tell just that story....
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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