There is something about history that tugs at me. I wish I knew it better. Then maybe I could see a light at the end of this tunnel of industrial-global-capital-whatever-ism. I know there are people who want to forget the past, but that’s because in a world where everything is quickly moving unstoppably forward, they can’t feel its presence. Even I find myself ready to leave history behind, until something-some experience-tugs at my shirtsleeves and forces me to remember it.

I was photographing an abandoned house in early August. At 90, the previous owner had lived most of his life jumping around the country; he was in the army for a stint and had various jobs repairing buildings before he settled down in many of St. Louis’ neglected properties. His life had the feel of one of those writers from the Beat generation, like William Burroughs or Jack Kerouac, who ignored society in preference of their own haphazard lifestyles.

The ceiling of the house had mostly fallen in, the windows were boarded, and a kind of dissonant music revolved like light through the rooms. While he lived there, the owner slept on a couch crumpled with blankets and flanked by a bookshelf and a television. Old notes were scattered in boxes, on top of shelves and next to electric wires-the fingerprints of his fastidious mind. Years of goodwill hunting had produced a collection of mediocre prints and paintings that-resting against the cracked plaster walls-were almost poetic in their worthlessness.

Moving from room to dilapidated room, I was struck by the disintegration and could not help but liken it to the previous night’s film. “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” had been the Tivoli’s midnight movie, and while I snapped pictures of the moldy curtains, I remembered Hunter S. Thompson.

In his despondency Thompson reacted to the world through sunglasses and licked the various flotsam and jetsam in a drug-filled suitcase off a dingy hotel floor. I remembered the caustic dryness of the on-screen desert, and the way the nation was being torn apart as Thompson existed in his hallucinogenic stupor. He had focused the despair of his generation into a sheet of LSD and felt in his trembling delirium the youths who were spreading napalm in eastern jungles and the anguish of idealists catapulted from the hopeful womb of the sixties into a decade of violence and rot.
The decay of the house and the transient sad life of its owner became, in my mind, synonymous with the decay of that decade. That 1970 anxiety had lodged itself between dusty books and worn carpet threads.

Then, matted with the oppressive heat of summer, the second connection came crashing down on me. The scene of old boxes and feverish drug addicts was layered over with our current era. History had caught up. I thought of the Iraq war, the desert battles, the pestilential stink of apathy, the homeless rotting on benches outside the Olive branch public library, troop surges and an electorate whose eyes have long since glazed over to reflect only the media abyss. Somewhere inside me, this cesspool of thoughts swirled around, and I saw the ebb and flow of events and the inevitable cord that unites the decades and all of us hapless Americans.

I thought about the decaying house, Thompson, Vietnam and Iraq. We all existed in this room. There was the image of a man whose life was coarse and nomadic, the sweating face of Johnny Depp squatting behind a war broadcast, our president saluting from yellowed pages of old newspapers. The lives of those people were immediate. They weren’t locked in a nursing home or speaking from a movie screen or exercising some distant power in media footage: They were real.

I don’t know history well enough to see how people of those eras fought their way out of the chaos. I wish I did, because then I’d have an answer for everyone who feels that we are part of our own decade of fear and loathing. Maybe, at least, there is some hope in the fact of this connectedness; that even if I can’t see how history moved forward, at least I know that it did move forward. Other people have fought these battles.

Overwhelmed by doubt, at least I know I’m not alone.

Roberta Singer is a freshman in the College of Arts and Sciences.