Archiving Narcissism

Timothy Leary of LSD fame has been gone from this earth since 1996, and it's taken this long for an institution to show some interest in his records.

We've gotten beyond the 'Me Generation', far beyond. Who cares about self-discovery and navel gazing these days? We're more concerned with finding enough loose change to cover the cost of our commute to work....if we have work.

The New York Public Library has paid $900,000 for the collected papers of Timothy Leary. Some of that money will be donated back in turn by the Leary estate to cover the costs of archiving the material, as if they had to pay someone to take the dust-gathering boxes off their hands.

Researchers are excited to get their hands on the data the late professor collected on psychotropic drugs, but after thirty or forty years, you'd have to wonder how useful old notes might be.

Then there's Leary's interactions with the Beat Generation for the historical record.

Still not generating much excitment, is it?

Several years after the fact, we can look back on the Sixties as a time of self-centered narcissism.

It was all about discovering your inner consciousness, finding personal happiness, experimenting with drugs to make yourself feel good. Many of those who turned on, tuned in and dropped out have become adults and they feel a bit embarrassed about living so selfishly.

You see an aging hippy these days and you see an almost comical figure, brain somewhat pickled, speaking in a patois that marks them as a being embedded in amber.

We're still too close to the Sixties to look at the era with a calculating eye.

In time, the archives purchased by the NYPL will be valuable to historians who wish to chronicle an era. Right now, it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to dive into the recent past, unless it's too see how much we've grown up since those childhood days of mind-altering drugs and free love that were as unrealistic as a fairy tale.