Time Capsule

August 12, 2006

Many people visit Europe in order to get in touch with history. This has always been a primary interest for me as well, but in all the many months I have spent here, I can honestly say that I never had such an intimate and visceral response to the past as I did today.

Deborah and I were driving home from Italian Switzerland, where we had spent a week’s vacation with her family. Our return route went by way of the San Bernardino Pass, one of the most important byways in Europe since ancient times, and we spent several hours exploring the towns and fortifications that had accumulated over the ages to exploit the strategic position of the valley. Moving on past ruin-dotted Chur, the oldest city in Switzerland, and through the sleepy wooden hamlets of Heidi’s own canton, we finally made it back to Deborah’s house. We were furiously hungry.

In the eating frenzy that followed, I blithely consumed the remainder of a jar of reddish sauce I found in a corner of the fridge. As I was putting the very last dab on a slice of zucchini, Deborah glanced at the jar and observed cheerily that the listed best-before date had come and gone some six years ago. Indeed, by some grand cosmic joke, the six-year anniversary of the expiration was this very week.

This gave me pause in a way that no mouldering Roman tower or precious cobble-stoned tourist town had ever done before. Six years is, after all, more than a quarter of my entire lifespan. And six years ago the world was a very different place. In the time that has elapsed since the Sauce forever ceased to be safely edible, four Olympic games have run their courses and the global population has increased by almost half a billion. When the World Trade Centre went down, the Sauce had already been festering for over a year; by the time of the Hurricane Katrina, it had been dead long enough to be eligible for sainthood. The end of its term predates the end of Arafat’s, Chretien’s, and Clinton’s – even, technically speaking, that of the second millennium. Six years ago I was but a half-grown schoolboy of sixteen, without any of the cares of age – food poisoning, parasites, intestinal cancer, and so on – to weigh me down. And even at that far-off time, the Sauce was pushing the limit of acceptability.

This, in any case, was my intimate response to the past. I’m still waiting to discover just how visceral it will be.