Whenever I read history books, the main thought that keeps occurring is that the days of old are, in fact, pretty much just last week.

I’m reading a book about manuscripts, and in the chapter I just finished reading, a bookseller named Vespasiano da Bisticci worked out of a stationery store in Florence during the Renaissance, just before printing transformed the world of bookselling. Vespasiano worked in Florence from 1444 until about 1479, when he retired to his home in the suburbs and started writing a book about the lives of many of his famous customers, including Cosimo de Medici.

I have been in the Florence of Vespasiano. In 2018, I bought a Visconti fountain pen about three blocks away from his stationery store (which still exists, but is now a shop selling handcrafted items).

Many of the books he sold have disappeared, of course, but then many of the books I owned in 1978 have also disappeared. 1978 is also just last week. So are a lot of other years.

I keep a journal, and I transcribe the bits I want to keep into computer files that I can search. Most of the time, when I search those files, I think, “Surely it can’t be that long ago.” Did you know that I was in Florence over eight years ago? And that I retired from my job ten years ago? I find that hard to believe. My adult kid is over 40.

Likewise, in 1444, the people living in Florence didn’t know anything about the continent where I live, and my country didn’t exist for more than three hundred years, but that’s a snap of the finger in the existence of the world.

Yesterday, I told my next door neighbor that I have lived in my current house for twenty years. This is not possible. I moved in yesterday, I swear.

1478, the year before Vespasiano moved to the country, was a bad year in Florence. There was plague in Florence. A conspiracy murdered Giuliano de Medici and wounded his brother Lorenzo. The archbishop of Pisa was hanged for his part in the conspiracy and the Pope put the city under interdiction because of the hanging. The river flooded, and Savaranola showed up and told everyone they were going to hell. I can see why Vespasiano (he didn’t die from the plague) sold his shop and moved away, especially because his main business was selling hand-copied manuscripts of the classics and he was outmoded now that printing was available.

Sometimes, when I am feeling bleak, I lie in bed and think that at some point, the Sun will have engulfed the Earth, and people won’t exist any more. Even if they manage to escape the Earth’s end, the universe itself will end in heat death, a boundless expanse of nothing. Other times, when I’m feeling slightly better, I reflect that in the very short time human beings have existed on the Earth, we have weathered some pretty terrible things, many of them things we do to ourselves, and then people forget. When I’m in a good mood, I think about all the things I want to learn. In any case, reading history always cheers me up.

And today, I’m thinking, sure, people are terrible, but they’re also pretty cool, and here we are, living in someone else’s “days of old.” My next door neighbor is in his early twenties, and some day he will tell people, “I remember 2026,” and they will look at him and think, “Old people, man.”