I often have thought I was born in the wrong time period, except modern medical technology keeps me alive, I always felt like I was born in the wrong era. Does anyone else relate to this? I can't afford many antiques due to lower income but when I can find them cheap, I will buy one like this Geography book: the older maps are fascinating:
In my apt in the living room are pictures and frames that do date from the Victorian Era. Older means better to me, and if it's not clothes due to my size or food, it's bought used. Thrift stores are far cheaper to find things at then new.
One of my best friends, a college friend of 30 years duration, works in estate sales, so this is a shared interest of ours. We discuss how they over-estimate the prices on Antiques Road Show on PBS. I usually cut them by at least half, and think about what they mean when they say something may get the money at auction or retail.
I have a collection of Victorian and some later photos-instant ancestors one can find at any antique shop that I have been collecting for some years. Here are acouple:
One dream job in an alternative universe would be antiques dealer, if I ever won the Lotto, the antique shops around me would be in heaven. LOL
is the Victorian era the time you wish you lived in? Any particular town? Have you read books or gone to museums? Or do you have more a general longing for the past than a longing for a particular time/place?
ReplyDeleteI don't like antiques but I like books. When I was a kid I dreamt of being well read. I wanted to be in the fellowship of Great Book. Visually, I guess I thought of a big room, in a mansion maybe, fancy bookshelves full of dusty old books, leather chairs, smoking jackets, good lamps, trays of tea, and Greek and Latin fitting in there somehow. It all had nothing to do with television or sports or pop culture, so I never felt like I fitted in with contemporary society.
Outside of some modern things like cars and A/C I wish I lived in the Victorian era, I also wish I was now in the 1950s and 60s too. [more medicine etc. LOL] Small town life appeals to me the most, and I did not learn this til I was in my 30s..
ReplyDeleteI wrote long ago about how I think modern life stinks here:
http://fivehundredpoundpeeps.blogspot.com/2011/06/thinking-about-modern-life-and-small.html
So I definitely long for the past. I don't like where the world is going. As I got older I feel even more removed. As a born again Christian, there are much of societies beliefs, values and more that I reject, but remember I see through the whole right-left paradigm so the thoughtless banker-loving/poor-hating Republicanism doesn't cut it for me either.
I like books too and own some from the 1800s beyond the Geography book. I have had fantasies about a library in my house full of old books, and a vast stamp collection too. I know I have these champagne intellectual tastes on a beer poverty budget. LOL Drinking tea in the library or sitting out on the veranda sounds nice to me. I dress in only long dresses and well, there are many aspects of life I want to return to. I befriended a lot of farmers and old school people in my old town. I don't understand a lot of young people and how they think. I like older things and how the world USED to be more. [yes I know there were some vast injustices] but I feel like the modern world is hurling faster and faster to destruction and a police technological state that all the science fiction movies seemed invested in warning us about. No the past is better to me. Most definitely. I even remember how things were in the 70s and 80s and life seemed far far brighter. So like you I do not fit in with contemporary society, and find much about it abhorent. There is a major part of me that would love to join an alternative way of life, perhaps a religious community etc, that lives closer to the older ways but my health that has prevented this.