Do you remember your first time? Not sex; that would be too personal a question to ask. But life offers plenty of other “firsts”. Depending on your age: your first proper washing machine.
Or your first computer. Or your first smartphone, operating via a button on the car’s steering wheel. For me, that steering wheel button, with the chance to make voice commands, arrived just a few months back.
It left me breathless with excitement. “When was Hitler’s birthday?” I asked the car first up, for reasons I don’t quite understand, only to receive an immediate answer (and, presumably, an ASIO file). I had follow-up questions about the population of Mittagong, the date of the Boer War and the meaning of life.
How exciting! Ewan McGregor as Count Rostov and Alexa Goodall as Nina in A Gentleman in Moscow. Credit: Ben Blackall/Paramount+ In the novel and TV series A Gentleman in Moscow , the main character sees an electric garage door for the first time. It’s 1953 and he comes across a photo in a purloined American magazine.
In this case, he doesn’t think much of the innovation, preferring the convenience of sleeping until noon and having someone bring him breakfast on a tray. By contrast, in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time , the narrator shares my excitement for the new. At one point he spots his first revolving door at the entrance to a hotel and describes its operation in some detail: “Once I had engaged with the unfamiliar workings of the turning door, I became.
