So much, small and large, can change over the course of a lifetime. My great-grandmother was born in a poor rural village at a time when radio was still an inventor’s hobby and died in a prosperous Western city where she could watch her favourite movie on a over and over again on a VCR in the comfort of her own home. I’m also reminded of the eulogy for Bert Cooper’s secretary in “Mad Men”: “She was born in 1898 in a barn. She died on the thirty-seventh floor of a skyscraper. She’s an astronaut.”
Of course, it’s not always progress. From an article on the decline of empires:
Let’s say you were a woman born in a thriving market town in Roman Britain in the year 360. If you survived to age 60, that market town would no longer exist, along with every other urban settlement of any significant size. You lived in a small village now instead of a genuine town. You had grown up using money, but now you bartered—grain for metalwork, beer for pottery, hides for fodder. You no longer saw the once-ubiquitous Roman army or the battalions of officials who administered the Roman state. Increasing numbers of migrants from the North Sea coast of continental Europe—pagans who didn’t speak a word of Latin or the local British language, certainly not wage-earning servants of the Roman state—were already in the process of transforming lowland Britain into England. That 60-year-old woman had been born into a place as fundamentally Roman as anywhere in the empire. She died in a place that was barely recognizable.
