All kinds of things to say, but here's what I'm thinking about Notes and Queries right this minute. It records a present that's very distant from our present--that's a given. But it also records a past that's removed from our own past. Things that are part of our distant, historical past are in Notes and Queries part of the recent past, or at the edge of living memory. For example, the black rat is long since extinct in England, replaced by the Norway rat, but in Notes and Queries we can read a memory of a particular London slum's demolishing, and how it was found to be infested with the older black rats, though the Norway rat was by then already firmly established. Other things have more of an M.R. James/Wicker Man feel--peculiar local festival customs that one or two elderly people still remember fondly from childhood, statues that a few people still remember seeing in a particular church, but no one knows when they were removed or what happened to them.
The overall feeling this gives me is a familiar one, and maybe doesn't lead anywhere in particular. One of those rotary-phone type emotions, pushed back a century: someday you will die, and the things you remember from your early life will be gone not just from the world but from the personal memory of the living. But it's good to keep being reminded that one time and another time are not islands surrounded by mist and inaccessible from one another, they're always joined by the long fading out of things. It's easy to think only of the periods when things were firmly what they were, not of the complicated and strandy and indeterminate times in between.
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