THERE IS A NEW YEAR'S story (it may even be true) about Merriman Smith, one of the great White House correspondents of mid-century. As a young reporter freshly arrived from Georgia in the 1930s, Smith was told to man the Washington desk on New Year's Day, while his more senior colleagues nursed their hangovers. His editors had told him to do some kind of New Year's roundup that would allude to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt's decision to spend the holiday at the White House. So Smith drafted a story that began: "The President and Mrs. Roosevelt passed the day at the White House, where they ushered in the New Year with black-eyed peas and ham hocks."

This level of detail caused a panic of why-we-no-have among other wire services. Reporters frantically called the White House to confirm the story. They were told it was untrue. When stories began appearing that the president had not had black-eyed peas, Smith was in the hot seat. His editors asked him who his sources were.

" Sources?" was his incredulous reply. " Everybody has black-eyed peas and ham hocks on New Year's Day."

It is always hard to be sure if you're doing something no one else does, but I'm confident that few people indulge in my own New Year's pastime. It is a mental game you can play to bring the past ever closer. You take an event that seems recent, figure out the number of years since it happened, and then count back from there. Almost inevitably, you find that recent things happened longer ago than you think.

Bill Clinton's election (1992), for instance, is closer to the 1970s than it is to the present. And Jimmy Carter's Inauguration Day (1977) is as close to Harry Truman's (1949) as it is to the one George Bush will enjoy at the end of this month. Eisenhower's arrival in Washington is closer to Queen Victoria's reign than it is to us. FDR's arrival in Washington (1933) is as close to Abe Lincoln's (1861) as to Barack Obama's (2005).

Why does this game work? Maybe because people want to believe they're younger than they actually are. Look at Woodstock (1969), now 36 years past and as close to the Hoover administration (1929-33) as to the present--but is still discussed as a credential of youthfulness rather than decrepitude. Music from the 1960s dates particularly badly. A lot of stuff by the Beatles ("I Want to Hold Your Hand," 1963) and Bob Dylan ("Blowin' in the Wind," 1963) is closer to "Yes, We Have No Bananas," which came out the year Warren Harding died (1923), than it is to Madonna's next hit. Or maybe it's that all music gets old fast. The Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the UK" (1976) belongs more to the era of "I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover" (1948) than it does to ours.

Probably, in our narrow-minded way, we look at the stuff we've experienced as "alive" and the stuff that went on before we arrived as "dead." We have a keen sense of sequence about what we've seen, while what we haven't seen is jumbled into the bin of "the past." Wars of royal succession, for instance, seem like the stuff of fable, vaguely medieval, while Marxism seems like a "modern" phenomenon, even if it has seen better days. And yet, three years from now, the Communist Manifesto (1848) will be no closer in time to us than it is to the Glorious Revolution (1688).

How modern is modernism in the first place? Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) is as close to the publication of Words-worth's Prelude (1850) as it is to anything now on the New York Times fiction bestseller list. Even some of the novelists who are in full vigor today published their first books an awful long time ago. Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (1948) is closer to the last scribblings of Whitman and Tennyson (d. 1892) than it is to any poem that will be published this year.

More binds us to history than we think. That's the optimistic way of looking at it. The pessimistic way is to say that time is proceeding at breakneck speed. Maybe that is why certain classes of people hate this game, and why even a kindly meant sally--like, "Mom, did you know that your coming-out party is now closer to the Battle of Sedan than it is to the present?"--can drive certain people into an inexplicable and unsportsmanlike rage.

--Christopher Caldwell