"Looking Backward"

 This is an enormous (dare I say huge?) subject, and, in under 600 words, I have only touched on a few aspects of how the creativity and inventiveness of a few individuals have radically improved our lives over the past 150 years. I suspect many of you have had similar thoughts, especially those of you who were fortunate to know your grandparents.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Looking Backward”

April 6, 2025

 

“Backward, turn backward, O time, in your flight,

Make me a child again just for tonight!”

                                                                                                                “Rock Me to Sleep,” 1859 

                                                                                                                Elizabeth Akers Allen (1832-1911)

 

The future holds my attention, but as I get older I spend more time looking backward. While historians look to the past to gain insights for the future, I look back – mostly at my paternal grandfather – to better understand the world of 150 years ago and contrast it with the one in which I grew up (and am still growing up). While the history of man, through written records, can be traced back 5,000 years to civilizations in Egypt and what is now Iraq, it constantly amazes me to realize how much our material lives have changed in just the past 150 years. 

 

Fortune favored me, in that I knew all my grandparents, though my maternal grandfather died when I was six. But my paternal grandfather, who was born in February 1873, died in 1963 when I was twenty-two. I knew him well, and because we shared the same name I always felt a special kinship.

 

But the circumstances in which we were born reflect a vastly changed America. When he was born, the United States had a population of 40 million. Alexander Graham Bell had yet to invent the telephone, which he did in 1876. And he was nine when Thomas Edison opened the nation’s first commercial power plant, the Pearl Street Station, in New York City. The first commercially available automobile, the Duryea Wagon, would not be offered for sale until 1896 when he was two years out of college. He was thirty when the Wright Brothers took their first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The first paved road in the U.S. appeared on a one-mile stretch of Woodward Avenue in Detroit in 1909 when my grandfather was thirty-six. And it would be 1935, when he was sixty-two, before one could travel from New York City to San Francisco on a paved highway, the Lincoln Highway. 

 

By the time I was born, the population of the U.S. had more than tripled to 132 million. Thirty-six percent of households had telephones and 75% had electricity. The number of cars on American roads were about 34 million and able to drive on 320,000 miles of paved highways. By 1953, airlines were flying non-stop commercial flights across the U.S.

 

War was more of a constant for my grandfather than for me. The February 15, 1898 sinking of the battleship USS Maine in Havana Harbor, shortly after my grandfather’s 23^rd birthday was the catalyst for the Spanish American War. He joined the Massachusetts Militia but never went to Cuba. Sixty-four years later I joined the U.S. Army Reserves, a year or so before our entry into the Vietnam War. He was forty-one when World War I broke out and sixty-eight when the U.S. entered World War II. His three sons and two sons-in-law served in the War, one of whom was wounded at Okinawa.  

 

Time moves on, and my grandchildren’s lives will be different (and probably improved) from mine, in ways we can only guess. Readers will note that the title of this essay comes from Edward Bellamy’s 1888 eponymous utopian novel. The difference being that Bellamy’s principal character, Julian West, is looking backward from a futuristic world he can only envision, while I look backward on a life I have lived.

"Where Has Time Gone?"

 My wife and I had a wonderful trip through the farm country of central Pennsylvania and the horse country of northwestern Virginia last week. We visited three student grandchildren. There was no talk of having classes cancelled, or of having been offered milk and cookies. We were uplifted by their positive outlook, their youthful enthusiasm, and their intellectual curiosity. They made us optimistic for the future.

 

I had begun this essay before we left, but daily drives of three and four-hours provided time to think more deeply on the subject – something personal to each of us, yet universal in its appeal. I hope you enjoy it.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“Where Has Time Gone?”

November 16, 2024

 

“It is strange how much you can remember about places like that

once you allow your mind to return into the grooves that lead back.”

                                                                                                  E.B. White (1899-1985)

                                                                                                 “Once More to the Lake,” 1941

                                                                                                   Essays of E.B. White, 1977

 

Where has time gone? Shaving, I am reminded of the song: “All I see is an old man/ Where a young man used to be.” Dressing, I think of J. Alfred Prufrock: “I grow old…I grow old… I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled.” All this causes me to, momentarily, yearn for the past. “Backward turn backward, O Time in your flight,” wrote Elizabeth Akers Allen in 1883, “Make me a child again just for tonight.” 

 

But when I think of the ever-increasing speed with which time passes, it is not of my own childhood, which stretched out for years, or even that of my children who took their time growing up. It is of my grandchildren I think. We expect special moments to last forever, even as the seconds and minutes tick by. Was it eighteen years ago that a photograph was taken of Caroline and me at the Hillsboro Club in Florida, each with an armful of squirming grandchildren? Now, the oldest is working in New York City and the youngest in her penultimate high school class. “How did it get so late so soon?,” asked Dr. Seuss. 

 

Time is tricky. Each day consists of twenty-four hours and each hour is comprised of sixty minutes. Yet as we age, each hour and day represent a smaller fraction of our lives. So time, which stretched interminably when we were children, is compressed as we age, with days and weeks flying toward our inevitable end. But time, as Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote, “leaves its shadow behind,” in its impact on those we knew. 

 

To our children, but especially to our grandchildren, we are the continuum of history, that the past is never gone. It lives on in memories, letters and photographs. It affects those who come after – it is the shadow to which Hawthorne refers. I recently came across a photograph of my great-grandfather, born in 1837, whose name was Sydney Williams, holding his only child (also a Sydney Williams) shortly after his birth in Vevey, Switzerland in 1873. Looking at the photo gave me pause to consider all that has transpired during the 187 years since the birth of my great-grandfather – of how progress improved our lives. Yes, the past remains.

 

White’s essay, quoted in the rubric, is of taking his son to the lake where his father would take him. The final sentence reads: “As he buckled the swollen belt, suddenly my groin felt the chill of death.” When we think of time, we recognize our mortality, and that, with the exception of God’s love, nothing is eternal. Respect for the past, tradition and values is not antithetical for a desire to improve the quality of the lives of our descendants. To our grandchildren, when they reach our age, we will be historical figures to their children and grandchildren. They, too, will think of the passage of time, of the impact we have had (which we hope is positive), and how the world has changed – which we pray will be for the better.    

"Aging"

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Essays from Essex

“Aging”

May 21, 2022

 

“This is what youth must figure out:

Girls, love, and living.

The having, the not having,

The spending and giving,

And the melancholy time of not knowing.

 

This is what age must learn about:

The ABC of dying.

The going, yet not going,

The loving and leaving,

And the unbearable knowing and knowing.”

                                                                                                                                              E.B. White (1899-1985)

                                                                                                                                              “Youth and Age”

                                                                                                                                              Poems & Sketches of E.B. White, 1981

 

We are born; we grow up, and we die. In a nutshell, that is aging. In truth, however, aging is much more. Aging takes us from a time where everything is new – people, things, experiences – when joy is in the anticipation and when the future stretches toward infinity and unknowns are exciting, to a time when we recognize life is finite, when joy is found in memories and experiences, and when, with apprehension, we look toward unknowns. Where are we headed? Will those I leave behind fare well?  

 

We age differently. Some become old betimes, others age gracefully and pain free. For a few, old age is lonely, a period of quiet despair. For others, it is a time of creativity and of giving back. Plato, who lived to be about eighty, thought aging natural and therefore good. His student Aristotle, who died at sixty-two, denounced old men as miserly and loquacious. In a some ways, however, we age similarly. Bones become brittle and our skin wrinkles. Hair thins or turns white. We forget where we left the keys, or the name of the person with whom we dined yesterday. Doctors’ visits become more frequent, and our pill intake increases. Almost fifty years ago an older client told me that a man spends the first half of his life making money and the second half making water. I now understand what he was saying.

 

There is a tendency, as we get older, to favor the past over the present. Michel de Montaigne, the 16^th Century French essayist, wrote: “Every period of life has its peculiar prejudices; whoever saw old age that did not applaud the past and condemn the present times?” In truth, age gives us perspective – there is good and bad in the past and in the present.

 

Two photographs – one of Caroline and me leaving the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York on a Saturday afternoon in April 1964; a second is of the two of us following renewal of our wedding vows in April 2014 – a 50^th anniversary celebration, performed at the insistence of our grandchildren who, oddly, missed the original event! With us in the second photo are our three children, their spouses and ten grandchildren, the latter dressed as bridesmaids and ushers. So, while the population of the U.S. increased 66% from 192 million to 318 million between 1964 and 2014, our family increased 900% from two to eighteen. Granted, there is some double counting because of in-laws. Nevertheless, I am happy to have helped give life to so many.

 

I look at my grandchildren and remember myself at their age and wonder: Would we have been friends? It seems such a short time ago, but so much has transpired in the intervening decades – in the world, in our nation, in my life. We long for simpler times. We empathize with the siren call of Elizabeth Akers Allen’s 1859 poem, “Rock Me to Sleep:”

 

“Backward turn backward, oh time in thy flight.

Make me a child again just for tonight.”

 

But there is no turning back. Nor should there be. So long as there is breath in our lungs, life in our limbs and reason in our brains, we should look ahead, enjoy what time we have, and do what we can to make life bearable for those who follow. As a friend once said: “In life, it is not the destination that counts, but the trip.” That does not mean ignoring history, for we are molded by the past, and mementos in the form of photographs, books, pictures and objects remind us of earlier years. They allow us to see life as a continuum, that we are part of a never-ending production line. Just as we were fashioned by those who came before us, we help shape those who come later. Life is not static; it is in constant flux. Man is a creative animal, so as standards of living change so do the standards by which we live; though the moral code embedded in the Ten Commandments is eternal. While we become more judgmental as we get older, that reflects our recognition that evil exists and is in competition with good; age helps us distinguish between the two

 

 

For me, old age has provided the opportunity to relax, to spend time with family and friends, to read and to write of issues that confront our times. I realize, as one does when old age creeps up, how short is our time, and that we owe it to ourselves to make the most of the time we have. I am thankful to be alive at this moment and to be able to record my opinions and reactions. I have been blessed in the family in which I was born and raised, in my wife, my children, my grandchildren and in my friends. 

 

As for age, I say bring it on!