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     From Paul Goodman's _Five Years:                 GOODMAN
     Thoughts During a Useless Time_:

     It was 35 years, not one lifetime,         
     between the death of Bach and Mozart.      
     All that style was almost a fad!  It       
     was not two long lives between the         
     settlement of Boston and the               
     Revolution!  I am 45 years old and I       
     recall most of my life, such as it has     
     been; it takes 120 such remembered         
     spans and we have all of human culture     
     from the Egyptians and the Chinese.        
     120 pretty good biographies and there      
     is History.  By "immemorial" we simply     
     mean infantile forgetting; the             
     infantile amnesia of 2 generations is      
     eternity.  When we see that the whole      
     of history is so brief, it becomes         
     again possible to be an agent of           
     history.  The change we can make in        
     history might be small, but is _is_        
     commensurable.  Indeed, these days when    
     I read the _Times_, I find that the        
     doings of my acquaintances make up a       
     large part of the news.  Every day more    
     so.  When I was an adolescent, up to       
     about last week, I certainly did not       
     consider the great world as the stage      
     of me and my friends, but now, alas!       
     it is precisely we who have become the     
     actors of that great world.  This makes    
     me think poorly of the great world, if     
     I and my friends are its actors; but       
     perhaps I shall come to think bigger of    
     me and my friends, since we act out        
     that great world.  (I doubt it).           
     Surely there must be some other value,     
     some quite different kind of                            SIZE
     experience, "outside" this History.                        
   
   
   
   
   
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