WAS EDISON RIGHT? CAN WE RECAPTURE EVERY VOICE FROM HISTORY?

Lets admit it. We take ourselves ever so seriously. Especially in this modern age when we can record every precious moment of our precious selves on our precious tapes. We possess a capacity ancient emperors would have killed for -- a permanent history of ourselves for all time.

And yet...

When later historians -- even later family members -- come across these collections, most will have scant importance. Little chance someone some day will come across our bar matzoh or anniversary footage with the same excitement of discovering a lost Mozart manuscript.

Talking about ol' Wolfgang, what would truly be exciting is Thomas Edison's last dream. He was working on a way of re-capturing the sounds of the past. Working from the principle of conservation-of-energy, he believed the energy of our voices is never lost. Somewhere in the cosmos the electrical impulses of past utterances might be found and re-created.

Think of it...! Mozart in rehearsal for his Jupiter Symphony. Alexander the Great at the conquest of the Persian capitol of Persepolis. Jesus at the Sermon on the Mount. Caesar at the moment of his bloody death in the Senate. Patrick Henry's "give me liberty or give me death!" Lincoln addressing the crowds on that rainy field at Gettysburg. Warren Harding playing poker and drinking whiskey with his cronies in the West Wing during Prohibition.

Then there's General Patton slapping that hospitalized GI in Sicily. Hitler's last rants from inside his Bunker. Martin Luther King the morning he stepped out on the fateful balcony. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney in the Oval Office selling the Iraq invasion.

Not to mention what Clark Gable said to Scarlett during some of the Gone With the Wind rehearsals. Or those tense moments backstage just before Sinatra or Elvis or the Beatles stepped out before the crowds.

While we're dreaming Edison's dream, how about the first halting conversation between mom and dad the day they met. Or the feelings expressed between them the night you were conceived. Or then there's --

But wait. Even Edison would admit that some sounds and voices from beyond the barrier of time were meant to fade away right along with time. Perhaps just experiencing one day at a time is quite enough....