Silliness Re Life and Death

Whenever I'm reading, say, a biography, and see a date like 1885-1975, I have to stop and look again. I know it's not a new thing, this spanning of the centuries. It happens all the time. People are born on a certain date, they die on another. But to me, there on the page in plain black on a white background, it is shocking. It's like when I read that Jane Austen was born in 1775, in the heat of the Revolutionary War. By the time she was 20, that war was in the past, old news, history. It's never referenced in her stories. It's just...I don't know how to describe it Heck, MY life is crossing from one century into another. Why is this so weird? Is it just me being myself?