Marriage Of Lifetimes

Today would have been my parents' 80th anniversary--married for a saeculum, a lifetime. If life extension ever becomes a thing, there may eventually be a total of 10 people on the globe celebrating their 100th or 160th (2 lifetimes) anniversary. That's more unnerving than touching. Instead of reflecting on past decades, they'll be reflecting on past saecula.

My father had already joined the army in 1942. The photo above was taken on what looked to be like a nice day in December 1942 or January 1943. The Empire State building was a decade old then, conceived in the Roaring Twenties and finished at the beginning of the Great Depression in 1931, a  beacon of American exceptionalism (with the idea of "automatic architecture") on the verge of its "First Turning", its sepia-toned Golden Age, its Spring, and summertime westward road trips in the late 1940s.

Here we are in the middle of a "Fourth Turning". I don't think 2023 will be our 1943, but if it is, 3 more years to Spring. Eventually, the Trump Era will end, as in "The end of the Waldorf had come".

It's also interesting to look at family photographs from the early 1940s because many men were in some kind of military uniform. The semiotics of that has completely changed given how that sense of exceptionalism spun out over the following lifetime.

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See Delirious New York, a great book on "Manhattanism" by Rem Koolhaas.

"The Empire State Building is a form of automatic architecture, a sensuous surrender by its collective makers - from the accountant to the plumber to the process of building. The Empire State is a building with no other program than to make a financial abstraction concrete - that is to exist. All the episodes of its construction are governed by the unquestionable laws of automatism. "The end of the Waldorf had come"".