Dancing Around the Four Sides

... and that for those who lived then, it was just "now." As ordinary and mundane as our own world is to us.

This, absolutely. It's always fascinating to look at the photos on a site like Shorpy.com and try to imagine the people in them a minute after the picture was taken. It's especially interesting with the Civil War photos, like the group shot of the battalion surgeons I posted here once -- that right after the shutter snapped, they were stretching their legs, starting to talk to one another, smiling, turning away and standing up to go attend to something else now that this fellow was finished with his camera. I think in a way that imagining of the Before and After of that frozen moment is helpful in writing -- it helps you get inside a character's head.

Ha, listen to me ramble. The damn chainsaws are STILL going, gah.

ETA that this is the photo.