The Marty Standard

As both a student and teacher of history I have long believed that true history stops about fifty years prior to whatever moment in which you live. My most basic reason for that is because we haven't had the proper distance between events and the current era to have enough a sense of perspective to fully understand, to better honestly appreciate, what had happened. More on that, perhaps, in tomorrow's blog, as I think it's an idea worth consideration. For today, I bring this up as a reflection on my recent reading. And my own mortality.

Right now I'm about half through First Man, a biography of Neil Armstrong, the first man on the Moon. The book I read immediately before that was titled simply Apollo 8, which detailed the first space flight to the Moon and back. This came after reading One Giant Leap, a history of the American space program as a whole. 

It occurred to me this morning that the Mercury, Apollo, and Gemini programs, having happened over 50 years ago, now qualify as history by the Marty Standard. Obviously too those are histories I remember witnessing, such as it were, to the degree that we all live in the world of the actions and events around us. So what I saw as a boy now fits my own definition of what history is. As proof, I'm reading about it in what are essentially history books.

Suddenly I feel old. And by my own measuring stick no less.