![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Did I dream it?
Jan. 22nd, 2008 01:34 amThe memory cheats, as someone once said. What we know of the past, outside documentary evidence, is what we remember of what we thought about what we perceived, and at that level of remove the word "know" becomes increasingly embarrassed and keeps trying to shuffle off the stage.
But I remember a time when, for the people my parents knew, "fuck" was a word not common in everyday conversation. Neither were "bloody," "shit," "cunt" or even "prick," except as a word for what thorns or needles did. "Damn" and "hell" were words schoolchildren said to be tremendously daring, and "Christ" was the name of the son of God. I remember a time when the people my parents knew thought having sex with someone to whom you were not married was not the obvious and natural thing to do, or if they did, they didn't talk about it. If it came out that someone had done such a thing, it could have a terribly damaging effect on their status in the community, and the people my parents knew were brought up to believe this whole-heartedly. As a compensation, perhaps, it was entirely possible to believe, in those days, that two people could live in close proximity for years at a time without being sexually involved, could even be close friends and show affection for one another without at any time inserting various fleshy nozzles into each other's moist places (as Fry and Laurie rather too memorably put it) whether they were of different genders or not.
I don't say it was a good time, though for us, back then, it didn't seem particularly bad. It had some very dark and nasty aspects, which many would say outweighed the good. There was a certain amount of hypocrisy, and a great deal of prejudice. But, for the people my parents knew, it was the way things were, and even though that mentality is practically impossible to recapture, even though a million angry genies have erupted from the bottle and it is lying in a thousand glittering shards on the sand, when one writes about people like the people my parents knew, it needs to be borne in mind.
Did I dream it? Maybe I did. But if I did, I was not alone. I was dreaming along with my parents, and the people my parents knew, and for our small section of the world, for a few short years, the dream was real.
But I remember a time when, for the people my parents knew, "fuck" was a word not common in everyday conversation. Neither were "bloody," "shit," "cunt" or even "prick," except as a word for what thorns or needles did. "Damn" and "hell" were words schoolchildren said to be tremendously daring, and "Christ" was the name of the son of God. I remember a time when the people my parents knew thought having sex with someone to whom you were not married was not the obvious and natural thing to do, or if they did, they didn't talk about it. If it came out that someone had done such a thing, it could have a terribly damaging effect on their status in the community, and the people my parents knew were brought up to believe this whole-heartedly. As a compensation, perhaps, it was entirely possible to believe, in those days, that two people could live in close proximity for years at a time without being sexually involved, could even be close friends and show affection for one another without at any time inserting various fleshy nozzles into each other's moist places (as Fry and Laurie rather too memorably put it) whether they were of different genders or not.
I don't say it was a good time, though for us, back then, it didn't seem particularly bad. It had some very dark and nasty aspects, which many would say outweighed the good. There was a certain amount of hypocrisy, and a great deal of prejudice. But, for the people my parents knew, it was the way things were, and even though that mentality is practically impossible to recapture, even though a million angry genies have erupted from the bottle and it is lying in a thousand glittering shards on the sand, when one writes about people like the people my parents knew, it needs to be borne in mind.
Did I dream it? Maybe I did. But if I did, I was not alone. I was dreaming along with my parents, and the people my parents knew, and for our small section of the world, for a few short years, the dream was real.