Two quotes from Alec Wilder's "American Popular Song" about composer Harold Arlen:
"Unlike Irving Berlin, who forged ahead in the days when there wasn't a great deal to get excited about, Arlen, my hunch tells me, might never have become a song writer had he grown up in those rolling but, to him, tepid times. For he needed the enriched and color-drenched sounds which had developed by the late twenties in order for him to want to be a writer."
"He entered the field of popular music at a propitious time, one in which he could spread himself and experiment rhythmically, harmonically, and melodically as he never could have even ten years before. To me it is like an invention, let's say the camera, appearing, and before you know it there is a man who seems, by his aptitude, to have been born to be a photographer. Had Arlen been born sooner or later than he was, there would have been little in the musical air to inspire him to be a writer of songs."
What Wilder expresses here is something I have been thinking about for a long time, namely that some people are born too early, some too late and some in just the right time for their particular talents and aptitudes to unfold and attain success.
Someone alive today who has a knack for computers is bound to find a good job, but might have been homeless a hundred years ago, others who are overwhelmed by the problems of modern life might have flourished in medieval times.
Think of Faraday: He was a groundbreaking scientist in his time, but relied almost entirely on the experimental method, since his grasp of theory was fairly slight. Someone like him would stand no chance in today's scientific climate. Similarly, had he been born earlier, the scientific advancements on which he built would not have been available yet.
It is my strong belief that I myself would have been able to cope better with life had I been born into a slower-paced, less technology fixated time.
