Exactly the Same. Only Different.

Westwood Village, 1934. This photo takes my breath away. So much the same. Everything completely altered. It’s like looking at an image from an alternate universe: utterly familiar, totally changed.

Writing about reasonably recent history can be like that. So much is still the same that the differences -- the sometimes vast differences -- can surprise you.

And then, when you’re looking in the other direction and are all swept away by those differences, you’re struck from another angle by how much nothing ever changes. Oh, sure: we move our hemlines, we swap our cars, and we swear in new and interesting ways, but the things that make us human -- the things that truly bind us -- those things never really change. At all.

The image included here is from The Westwood Neighborhood Council’s pictorial history of Westwood.

I don’t know who made the photo. It’s possible no one even remembers anymore.