1955: the antepenultimate present tense

Photograph of Miles Davis in Montreal,
achieved by Anton Corbijn (b. 1955)
for which we are all grateful

In 1955 a not particularly unprecedented yet stunning concordance of starlit events occurred. (The next timespan that would have such luminosity and present tense was 1968-1969, and there has not been one since: date 2009.)
In 1955 Charlie Parker and James Dean and Wallace Stevens died, and Emmett Till was murdered.
At that time it struck me that motor racing drivers possessed transcendental glows; Bill Vukovich and Alberto Ascari were killed. Later I got to know John Fitch who was Pierre Levegh‘s co-driver at Le Mans when Levegh’s crash killed himself and 86 spectators.
We lined up for Salk vaccine, reverently led to believe that God was touching us.
Berners-Lee and Jobs were born.
Lolita was published, in Paris.
Miles Davis played at Newport and heard the wide expanse of his future.
In Ithaca, there was the probability that on one afternoon within a few stonesthrow of each other passed Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Farina, Suzanne Guerlac, Barbara Hodes, Paul Fucking Wolfowitz, Judy Hamilton, Vicki Boynton, and me.
In Greenwich Village, scuffling in dusty streets and dim flats and bars of breathtaking possibility and animation, artists and writers plotted the ways in which they could portray that the next years would roll over the safe cave of freedom the mighty mossy stone of crushing derivatives and the foetid holocaust of received ideas and inheritance.