My wife and I landed in Honolulu for the first time on August 5, 1977, and five years later to the day our daughter was born. On August 5, 2024, I celebrated the anniversary by climbing into Newspapers.com and looking up the Honolulu Advertiser for August 5, 1982. Back then Honolulu had two newspapers, and we subscribed to the one delivered to our apartment that morning, the morning our daughter arrived by premature surprise.

Once you’re past page 1, how different the paper’s universe seems now. On August 5, 1982, Gibson’s, a popular department store no longer extant, was proffering calculators on back-to-school sale, and Kaimuki Typewriter, likewise no longer extant (and never, during my memory, in Kaimuki) was running a big ad featuring the new and expensive daisywheel typewriter. Mainly, though, the news from the back pages then is that there were back pages: page after page of them, filled with classified ads to be read on wood-pulp paper.

Those trees are down now, of course. But what has remained unchanged since 1982 is still time, and time still has its page 1. Terrible things are about to happen, says page 1, then as now. Terrible things, specifically, in Beirut.

The columns in the temple fall and rise and refall and re-rise, forever.