Yesterday I bought an old book for a friend. I mean a really old book, one filled with fashionable descriptions of up-to-the-minute comings and goings of people now long gone from this world.
I wonder whether, when that book was being put together, any of the individuals involved in its creation stopped for a moment to wonder whether it would be read by people far off in the future.
If so, would those denizens of a now vanished world have been able to put themselves into our shoes, reading about their own time as some exotic and long lost place?
Could we ever imagine our own time in such a way?