We grew up in an image-deprived world. We had very few books, and they were all text or sparsely illustrated. Color photographs were even rarer. There was no television. The only magazines with color photos were propaganda magazines published and distributed by the United States and Soviet Union governments. The few pictures we had access to had a disproportionate impact. I would often stare at a beautiful picture for minutes, absorbing all the details, and come back to it the next day.
In that atmosphere, my father bought me an amazing gadget one day, certainly beyond his means -- a View-Master. It was a gray plastic device that looked like a pair of binoculars. You had to insert a round disk into it. When you looked through the two lenses, a 3D image popped out. There was a lever on the right. Using it, you could move to the next 3D image. Each disk contained 7 3D images, made from twice as many 8 mm stills.
The device came with only two sets of disks, and that was all I had. My favorite was the one called “Paris.” It featured beautiful picture-postcard images of the city. I was mesmerized by its beauty and grandeur. I would flip through them again and again, absorbing every detail. I knew exactly how the green leaves in the foreground framed the bright pink flowers in the Luxembourg Gardens or the Tuileries. They were not only beautiful but also futuristic. I had never seen anything like this in Calcutta or in the few places I had visited as a child. They seemed to have materialized from science fiction. The images were imprinted on my memory.
Almost forty years later, around 2003, I was telling this story to a colleague at the Encyclopedia Britannica office in Chicago. Stacy Hope probably found the anecdote interesting. A few days later, Stacy walked into my office with a small paper bag. She told me she got me something and set it on my desk. I opened it to find a black plastic View-Master. I was thrilled and turning it around when she asked me to look at the disks she had gotten. One of them was the “Paris” disk! She found them on eBay and bought them for me. I can say this remains the most thoughtful, impactful, and unexpected gift I ever received.
I promptly inserted the Paris disk into the device and started viewing. What happened next is hard to describe, but let me try. On the one hand, these images brought back all the childhood memories of seeing exactly the same images forty years ago. The awe, the joy of seeing something beautiful, the strange nostalgia of seeing a place I had only seen in pictures, and the feeling of looking into the future. However, I have visited Paris many times in the last ten years. I have seen these places with my own eyes. These pictures did not match what I had seen – they are antique images of the city. These 1950s images of Paris felt quaint and ancient, like something from a past that no longer exists.
The same physical image triggered feelings of the past and the future. I was on a time machine that had forgotten which way to go, traveling backward and forward at once. This feeling came once and never again. And of course, eBay is a time machine in the hands of someone like Stacy.
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