Doesn’t this always seems to happen? You learn a new word and then you see it everywhere. You see a movie and suddenly everything is a parody of it? I watched "2001: A Space Odyssey" last week for the first time, and suddenly I was inundated with its runoff. It was as if a piece of cultural consciousness I was never aware of had been given to me. Every scene, every shot has been parodied, but they all slid past me. The image of HAL 9000 was instantly familiar, the shot of the monkeys and their monolith sent a gasp of recognition through me.

And so the movie passed, without any surprises. It was a strange feeling, as if I had been there before, a nostalgia for something that I had never experienced before. It was almost a déjà vu, with each piece falling into my mind as painlessly as a fact I had forgotten.

And more than just the thousands of parodies I had seen and not comprehended, there was the strange feeling of viewing an original, the first of the artistic sci-fi genre, whose echoes are evident in all subsequent installments of the genre. A few months ago, I saw "Interstellar," a prime example of this cosmic awe, with its gorgeous, twisting nebulae and indecipherable ending. Yet now, with the knowledge of its predecessor, what was to me revolutionary is suddenly an homage, a retreading of images already created, side by side with ones new and beautiful, which one day will just have references in movies of the future.

I don’t watch a lot of movies. Not out of any pretension or disrespect for the media, but out of an inability to sit still for more than 20 minutes at a time. "2001: A Space Odyssey," a movie of almost three hours in length, was undoubtedly a challenge, but the sudden section of cultural ethos delivered to me was a shock that made watching the film worth it. But it struck a strange thought: what other circles of popular culture am I completely ignorant of? I haven’t seen "Gone with the Wind" or "Casablanca," "Jaws" or "Citizen Kane." I don’t even know the premise of "Chinatown," and I’ve started "Seven Samurai" many times, but never finished it. And yet, I have no doubt that if I were to watch any of these movies, they would be familiar, like pictures of famous art pieces when viewed in the flesh, or the music played over and over in the soundtrack of movies heard in entirety on the radio, cultural hallmarks that exist forever and ever in echoes.