A Personal/Cultural History of 1968

It's New Year's Day, 2008. I just read Bob Herbert's essay in the NYTimes:

Still Reeling After all These Years
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/opinion/01herbert.html?em&ex=1199336400&en=e08b95da8ccddfaa&ei=5087%0A

I have a great interest in that year, 1968, a year when I turned 16. My first interest is as a historian - I consider it the midpoint of the pivotal decade in the history of this country, a decade that started full in the blush of Kennedy optimism, and ended in the jadedness of Nixon and the OPEC price shocks, changing the American scene (to this point) permanently. It was the end of the 5 years of trying to make this country live up to its ideals, and the beginning of a five year period of disillusionment after disillusionment, leaving us with a cynicism that we have not yet been able to cast off.

I have interest in 1968 for personal reasons - the end of youth, the beginning of adulthood. The year I fell deeply in love, seriously in love, for the first time; the year of my improbable and life changing spiritual awakening.

1968 was the beginning of my life as a creative person, and as a mathematician.

In 1968 I read the most influential books of my literary life - Moby Dick and The Grapes of Wrath - and saw the most influential movie of my life so far - 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It is hard to communicate to young people today what life in the Sixties was like, how much change went on, how many events happened, how they came at you on a daily basis. Even within such a decade, 1968 was special in that it was the most eventful of all of the 60s.

I decided to create this blog as a kind of personal journal of a restrospective journey. There is so much about that year, that time, both personally and as a person awake and aware at the time (and by the end of the year even moreso...), that I would like to document, to express, if for no other reason than to add to the colloquial history of the time.

I don't know, at the moment, what shape this will take, how it will evolve, what impact it will have, whether anyone will choose to read it or keep up with it.

All I know is that everything in it will have deep connection to 1968, the most important year in the history of the US, if not the world, post WWII, and the most important year in my own life.

Let's see where it leads...