It's difficult to recapture that mood of awestruck submission now.
It is difficult to recapture the excitement Orson Welles generated 50 years ago among cinephiles and serious theatregoers.
It is difficult to recapture the old sense, which Arnold had, that the literary critic is the critic par excellence, that the study of literature gives you the best vantage point from which to understand an entire society.
When a side produces such an adrenalin-charged performance in the field as England, it is difficult to recapture the momentum, the 10-minute interval between innings ample time for nervous energy to dissipate.
And when a car successfully blazes a new direction for its brand, it is brutally difficult to recapture the excitement of the original with the second generation.
Even within Russia, it has been difficult to recapture the significance once accorded bells.
It's an experience that gets increasingly difficult to recapture as we age, both because we read much faster than we used to, and because we take on novels of increasing complexity, like "Ulysses" or "Gravity's Rainbow," which are not, precisely, page-turners.
Craig Hassall, the outgoing CEO of Opera Australia, looks back to a time when Nolan, Patrick White and others of their generation were major contributors to the arts in Australia: "It was a kind of golden age of talent, one that's difficult to recapture and is a great loss," he says.
These are the most inventive and the most difficult to recapture.
