more on history
Is the tragedy of history that we have to repeat it to ourselves? That it's left us, and if we don't record it -- then read it -- it almost never happened? Clearly, the implications and ramifications of history are everywhere -- cause and effect are basic laws of the universe.
There is something so tragic, so awful in reading about the lives and actions of men and women who lived 400 years ago, as though they were the characters in some vast drama invented by an author. It's hard not to think of us -- living out our remarkably technology-inflected lives in this alternate universe; me, typing this out on a portable computing machine at a coffee shop a few blocks from my apartment; a combination so distinctly 21st century -- living our lives through. And history created and logged (better than ever, ever before) around us. And the forces of entropy and decay working their magic of hard drive failure and sweeping studio fire, of course, but what a record we'll leave. What a record.
But rather, that we're a part of this timeline as much as any man or woman we read about. That in another 400 years (in a fatalistic view, they're already here, we just can't see them) people will read books about the greatest and worst of us. And it's not the sinking impression that most of us will be forgotten, but that there will emerge a sediment of leaders and crooks and we'll have nothing to say about them. At least, nothing that wouldn't take years of digging. And what a luxury those men and women of 400 years to the future would hold, then, if any of this even survives to them. I could care less about being remembered for my contribution to history (the field), but how, how, HOW? to feel connected, humanly, to the stories in the books?
Maybe that's the most important thing any of us can do. To draw bridges on the maps already drafted by the historians. To live in them a while. How important, and horrible. How necessary, and unfair. How futile, how human.
There is something so tragic, so awful in reading about the lives and actions of men and women who lived 400 years ago, as though they were the characters in some vast drama invented by an author. It's hard not to think of us -- living out our remarkably technology-inflected lives in this alternate universe; me, typing this out on a portable computing machine at a coffee shop a few blocks from my apartment; a combination so distinctly 21st century -- living our lives through. And history created and logged (better than ever, ever before) around us. And the forces of entropy and decay working their magic of hard drive failure and sweeping studio fire, of course, but what a record we'll leave. What a record.
But rather, that we're a part of this timeline as much as any man or woman we read about. That in another 400 years (in a fatalistic view, they're already here, we just can't see them) people will read books about the greatest and worst of us. And it's not the sinking impression that most of us will be forgotten, but that there will emerge a sediment of leaders and crooks and we'll have nothing to say about them. At least, nothing that wouldn't take years of digging. And what a luxury those men and women of 400 years to the future would hold, then, if any of this even survives to them. I could care less about being remembered for my contribution to history (the field), but how, how, HOW? to feel connected, humanly, to the stories in the books?
Maybe that's the most important thing any of us can do. To draw bridges on the maps already drafted by the historians. To live in them a while. How important, and horrible. How necessary, and unfair. How futile, how human.