Ours Not To Reason Why

My mother sent me the most astonishing link today. It's a sound recording (on an Edison wax cylinder) of a man who was at the Charge of the Light Brigade, playing the bugle call from that charge, on a bugle that was also used at the Battle of Waterloo.

Just the idea of this is arresting, but hearing him speak and hearing the bugle is incredibly moving:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10204

Occasionally one comes across those moments where there is a great leap backward in time, with only one or two degrees of separation. My great-grandmother (whom my mother vividly remembers) was alive when that recording was made, and the man who made it was performing on a bugle from at least 1815.

It puts me in mind of recordings of the last castrato singer (eerie, to say the least):

http://www.amazon.com/Moreschi-Last-Castrato-Alessandro/dp/B000000WYS

or the last few remaining veterans of the Great War (which is a subject of endless fascination for me, and more immediate in my imagination than many events within my living memory), or that (possibly) 250-year-old tortoise who died earlier this year:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adwaitya

Two hundred and fifty years! A creature that was alive before the Revolutionary War! Unbelievable!

What is it that makes us want to literally touch the past? When I visited the British Museum I was able to walk right up to the Rosetta Stone. Sneaking a glance around to see if there were any guards, I reached out and touched it. I touched the ancient Rosetta Stone, key to the Egyptian hieroglyphics. I remembered learning about it in eight grade history...and there it was. (Apparently it's under glass now, after a late 1990s restoration. Bummer.)

A fragment of what might or might not be a quotation is bumping around my brain--I feel like it's Shakespeare, but am coming up with nothing. It's a banal quote alone, but I can't find it anywhere: "The past is present."

Here is a quote about the past that suits my mood (from Bartleby.com):

"The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memoried glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow’s past."

Mary Webb (1881–1927), British author. Precious Bane, foreword (1924).