This week: The Past, the Present and the Future Edited by: Kit  
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It is interesting to think about the past. But we cannot truly know how life used to be before we were born, nor can we know how our current lives will be perceived by future generations.
This week's Drama Newsletter, then, reflects on history, and the making of it.
Kit |
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Do you enjoy reading or watching historical dramas? I confess that I quite like to indulge in Jane Austen’s work and I happily settled down to watch Bridgerton. Most recently, I have taken to watching Downton Abbey. I am a little late to the party with that one, but that’s where streaming services come in handy.
It’s all fiction, of course. Even Jane Austen’s work, which were contemporary novels at the time of writing, can never inform current-day readers of what life was truly like for the author and her immediate audience. We catch glimpses, and we use our imagination. We may have done our research and built up our knowledge of historical facts. But we’ll never know how it was to walk along those lanes and streets, to dine at those tables, to work and build relationships in a world that is much the same, but also very different from the one that we are familiar with.
Because a lot has changed. There are many things in our every-day lives that we take for granted that would be completely alien to people who lived a hundred or more years ago. The last century has seen a rapid development of technology. We have grown up with cars, refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners… we can step on a plane and travel to the other side of the planet rather than spend months on a ship, risking the waves to get there. We can communicate instantly with people from around the world and have more knowledge at our fingertips than any library can hold.
It is a fun idea to be able to travel back in time, and I am pretty certain that I would embrace the opportunity were it offered to me, but it is not that easy to imagine wandering the streets back when sewers did not exist. The odors would be overwhelming. Food would likely seem bland without the variety of herbs and spices that we have grown accustomed to. And whilst we still have a long way to go, equality between the sexes has improved significantly within the last decades, at least in many countries, as has racial equality. Future generations may see us as very much a work-in-progress still when it comes to these matters and more, but I am rather glad to have been born in a time when I am an equal partner in my marriage. A time in which I have the vote, and I am able to pursue an education to a level as high as I am capable of keeping up with. I do not know how I would respond if anyone were to treat me as an inferior merely because of my being a woman.
I do not know how I would respond to anyone treating me as inferior full-stop. Class is an issue to this day, at least here in the UK, but at least those who consider themselves to be upper class no longer expect those who they see as being members of the lower classes to bow before them and treat them as oh-so-superior. Or, not generally. We do now have this weird celebrity worship that sees people calling other people idols, and people on low incomes sending money to someone who’s famous for being famous, just so that that person can ‘finally’ be a billionaire, and people referring to themselves as a stan, regardless of the origin of the term, and entire groups of stans sending threats to other groups of stans, or to anyone who they perceive as not showing enough respect to their idols or, indeed, anyone daring to be romantically involved with one of their idols. I don’t know what someone from, say, the 18th century would have made of that…
I guess each historical age has its peculiarities, and as writers we can weave them into our stories. We cannot know what future generations will make of them, but who knows… you might spark something in their imagination. Because of your words, they might end up wondering what it would be like to live in this day and age. Or at least to visit. Isn’t that something wonderful to aspire to?
Kit
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Wishing you a week filled with inspiration,
The Drama Newsletter Team |
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Drama: August 25, 2021 Issue [#10951]
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