"'Out of the past' was the name of the store, and its products consisted of memories: what was prosaic and even vulgar to one generation have been transmuted by the mere passing of years to a status at once magical and also camp."
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Our protagonist.
Photo courtesy of Harvard
Political Review |
Those are the opening lines of the novel written by Gil Pender, Owen Wilson's character in Midnight in Paris. Gil is a true romantic. Deep inside him lives the notion of Golden Era Thinking, the belief that one's outlook on life and priorities better befit a period in the past than the modernized world. His perfect society is Paris in the 1920s, in the rain. One night, something miraculous and inexplicable occurs, and a man tired of the rush and technology and (from his perspective) dearth of creativity of the 21st Century is transported back in time, fulfilling his dream. Every night, he is lucky enough to return to dance and converse with the great musicians, artists, writers and intellectuals of this famed decade. He falls in love with the past.
Like Gil, I too sometimes wonder about what it would be like to have been born sometime else. For me, I don't have a particular era; it could be the '50s, the '80s, the 1750s, the 1500's, maybe in some ancient civilization. It's not as much where I'm going as getting out of where I am.
