It's that time of year again which always brings radical changes in my life. Over the next few days I'll be leaving my summer job and moving back to university; it's like changing over to a different life, everything around me moves and changes. It's odd the way things can lose their palpability so quickly; in a few weeks time my surroundings here, and a lot of the people I have spent the whole summer speaking too, will become semi-real. Except for a few reminders, my contact with this location, this "world" will cease and I wont really be involved in it for a few months, however, I know when I come back it will become "real" again almost instantly, and my university life will start to drift away. It feels as though for things to keep existing for me they need to be close enough to me in time or space.

On the same note, I recently watched Triumph Of The Will, the Nazis pre war propaganda film. In parts it shows literally hundreds of thousands of troops lined up on display, listening to a weighty speech from Hitler, with endless clapping and cheering, magnificent energy in support of their leader and the Nazi ideology. I can look at this, and I know it happened only seventy years ago, people are still alive who saw this film when it was first released; yet I can't really see it as real. I can't feel a direct connection to it, I can hardly believe the world I am in now is the same world displayed in the film. It's not like, for example, North Korea, where similar displays happen, because I know it's possible for me to go and see North Korea with my own eyes, to experience it, whilst the Germany in the film has gone forever. Yet even North Korea is far less "real" than this room around me, because it is so far away, so detached from myself. Taking it further, what about the ancient Egyptian empire? or Cave Men? I am so detached from them they could almost be fiction.

I think that in some ways the past and the distant can become almost as unreal as the future, even though we have evidence of events from the past. I wouldn't normally place such faith in my senses, and there are times when I can really feel the weight of the past, perhaps I just need to go and see the pyramids or something to bring my frame of reference more into line.