Remembering the Past

[Penfeather]

I hope I did not give a wrong impression. In praising this forum's past, I did not mean to slight its present or future.
However, I do not mind your tangent at all. It's far better than my original post. I enjoyed reading yours more than I did writing mine.

You are too kind. The point you brought up was quite resonant. I've been thinking about the apparent conflict of wisdom between the common adage, "You shouldn't dwell in the past" and the rather obvious fact that all of storytelling, all of man's mythology, is about the past (and idealizing it). Even futurism, sci-fi, is told in the past tense and can only draw on what humanity has been so far.

Up until publishers ceased to print Gothics in the late '70s, many "contemporary" Gothics were set in the present. I wonder, though, if this would still be appropriate for the genre today if it were to become popular again. Somehow, the Gothic atmosphere seems incompatible with cell phones, Twitter, Facebook, GPS navigation systems and other forms of global instant communication (sorry, GothicRomanceForum.com -- I know I'm a hypocrite). I think I could accept a new Gothic set in the late 1970s, possibly even the very early '80s (up until home computers appeared), but not later. Unless, perhaps, the setting were so remote, so removed from technology and modern living, that the atmosphere of an earlier period could be preserved. But anyway I imagine that any hypothetical new crop of Gothic writers would prefer to work in the traditional period of the 19th Century.