great chain of being

Fascinated by the concept for many years and curating outstanding examples of the phenomenon, Jason Kottke has also appended a fitting name to describe the way some individuals can bridge eras and keep generations barely acquainted in fact adjacent: the great span.
Referencing a recollection by the son of Alger Hiss—a US government official implicated as a spy for the Soviet Union by the House Un-American Activities Committee—of the term his father used to describe such lives able to somehow overlap and connect the ages, culturally and technologically as well as in terms of longevity. It’s a far more magical equivalent of those collection of jarring simultaneities of trivia (idem) like Switzerland’s delay in universal suffrage coincided with the first motor vehicle excursion on the Moon or that Star Wars debuted during the same year as the last execution by guillotine.