The rise and fall of generation now
The rise and fall of generation now

Summary/Abstract: Before this lecture, you have all had coffee; after we’ve finished, we will all have lunch. “Before” and “after”: no expressions can be more commonplace, yet none, when you come to think about it, can be more perplexing. Imagine you are standing in aqueue. There are people standing ahead of you; they arrived before you did, and are that much closer to the future towards which we are all shuffling. Then there are people behind you; they arrived after, and are that much further away. The former came early; the latter came late. Perhaps, if we were to enlarge the scale of our metaphor, we could imagine generations queuing up like this. There are people of your generation, lined up in arow. Ahead, in serried ranks, lie the generations of your forebears. Behind lie generations to come, preparing to make their way. Not all of these people, of course, may still, or yet, be alive. But even those who have “passed,” as we say, continue to cast their shadows over their followers, just as those who have yet to be born will emerge in the shadows of our own generation. But here’s the puzzle. For we are just as likely to say, of ancestral generations, that they lived in times past, and of descendant generations, that they will be the denizens of times future. The generations ahead of us, whom we had followed, are now behind; those behind, who had followed us, are now ahead. Before and after, it seems, have switched places. What can account for this curious reversal of fortune?

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