I have been watching the three series of “Yes Minister” and two series of “Yes Prime Minister”.  I do not quite have the energy to describe it fully, but one important component is the character of Sir Humphrey Appleby, a civil servant who often replies to questions from his minister with convoluted and verbose answers.  Two of my favourite are:

Sir Humphrey: “The identity of the Official whose alleged responsibility for this hypothetical oversight has been the subject of recent discussion, is NOT shrouded in quite such impenetrable obscurity as certain previous disclosures may have led you to assume, but not to put too fine a point on it, the individual in question is, it may surprise you to learn, one whom you present interlocutor is in the habit of defining by means of the perpendicular pronoun.”

Sir Humphrey: “Yes, unfortunately although the answer was indeed clear, simple and straightforward, there is some difficulty in justifiably assigning to it the fourth of the epithets you applied to the statement, inasmuch as the precise correlation between the information you communicated and the facts insofar as they can be determined and demonstrated is such as to cause epistemological problems of sufficient magnitude to lay upon the logical and semantic resources of the English language a heavier burden than they can reasonably be expected to bear.”
Jim Hacker: “Epistemological? What are you talking about?”

It is still one of my favourite sitcoms, not only because I find it very funny, but also because it conveys a certain sense of nostalgia.  It is not difficult for me to recall some facets of life in the 80′s, but I’m also certain that I am misremembering other parts of it.  Strange how different decades have different “textures” in my memory.  Even those that I did not live in.  I think I have a pretty good idea of what the sixties were like in South Africa, but when it comes to the fifties, my idea becomes quite vague.

I am a little wary when it comes to nostalgia:  it is easy to fool oneself when it comes to this emotion, and I believe that it dishonours the past to oversentimentalize it.  Is it too melodramatic to say that we should treat the past with respect?  Or has our modern cultures conditioned us to believe that the past is cheap, dispensible, irrelevant?  Many of the you who read this paragraph may have grown up in an age where the status quo is in flux to a much greater degree that before.  At least in peace time.  We are living in the Transient Age.

The past is a communal education that we have acquired, paid for with our time and our lives. I am not saying that we should be glum or too stuck up about it, but I have the feeling that I have neglected it myself.  I do not know how to address this, but I do not want to ignore it.