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Way before the movie “Planet of the Apes” showed us the Statue of Liberty half buried in the sand, I have felt the need to experience cultures which grew, fell into decadence and vanished. These are probably cautionary tales even beyond their aesthetic marvel.
Edward Albee took a trip to Easter Island, and wrote about it in the New York Times.
Mickey Birnbaum
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Interestingly Mickey - at least in the NYTimes on line, the article was listed under theatre rather than travel.
Having been very young during the late 50s/early 60s cold war years, Cuban Missle Crisis, threats of nuclear armageddon — which I recall as being simplified in my mind to “Someone, somewhere. at any time, can push a red button and blow up the world” — the concept of complete extinction at any moment in time became a permanent part of my psyche, something I carried around day to day. It wasn’t even something that kept me up nights, it was so seamlessly woven into my concept of life. This even carried over into adulthood — in my 20s, I found parental urgings to put money into an IRA account ridiculously naive, as the percentage chance of there being no world (or no United States, or no whatever place I’d be living in) left by the time I was 65 seemed too high. I remember joking to friends, “I don’t want my last thought to be ‘that goddamned money I tied up in an IRA!” As I get older, this feeling/belief has faded considerably, but it hasn’t disappeared. I wonder if anyone else around my age (I’m almost 50), or any other age for that matter, grew up with this kind of ingrained view.