This afternoon the populace of the city paraded in procession before that wonderful instrument, the moving picture machine. A momentary glimpse of the town’s life on the streets was caught and fixed in preservation. The images of the scene, moving in the sunlight of a day that will be gone tomorrow, living and breathing, on the instant, was snatched from the grasp of time and sealed beyond the power of change, a silent fadeless pageant of what we were.

Now the crowds have scattered, and the people have returned to their homes and from the canvas of memory the transitory scene has already begun to fade.

The same grouping will not again occur. The same people can never assemble again. They themselves have changed in the short time. The school children have passed a little further on to adult life. The boys and girls are older and the aged have stepped nearer the grave. Those moving pictures of civic life which daily fill our streets and the streets themselves are changing. New houses will be built and others torn down; new children will come and the grim reaper will bind the ripened grain, but the picture on the reel which was made today will never change. It will come back and march in silent pageant, the horses prancing, the throng gesticulating, laughing, talking, cheering silently like the ghost of time.

These will be the real ghosts of the coon hunt. There will be no ghosts caught at the camp grounds as marvelous as these ghosts of ourselves. We will sit in the picture show hereafter and see ourselves living in the past, the resurrection of the past, and live again this day. And soon there will be some on the picture screen whom we once knew but know no more. The panorama of the world is passing. All creation is a moving picture. Beings on the far off worlds toward which the light is traveling from this one will see in ages yet to come our pictures when we have passed away, and perhaps when our spirits have winged their way to those celestial homes, flying swifter by angel flight than sunbeams go, we may arrive in time to see the pictures of our whole past life unroll before us like this reel today. If so, make the pictures now the way you want to see them.

—“The Pictures of Today,”
Moberly (Mo.) Weekly Monitor, November 7, 1913