Deep Time, if pondered, produces a profound sense of temporal vertigo unlike anything. When we speak of events 20, 30, 40.000 years ago, the numbers scarcely register.
A man, gazing out from a hill 40kya, would have still *30.000 years* to go before even the end of the Ice Age.
Consider the stories we tell set in the "far future". Most of these take place only as far as the 3rd or 4th millenniums. Even such works as Warhammer 40k, set in an almost incomprehensibly distant future, is closer to the present than the first modern humans to enter Europe.
We popularly envision "cave men", or even a more nuanced notion of "Palaeolithic people" as essentially one culture, one way of life. Yet even within the Lascaux caverns, the distance in time between the first & last paintings was maybe 100x that between Rembrandt and Picasso.
The dizzying truth is that we cannot grasp & classify the ancient past. Not really. We can make vague groupings of styles of flint technology, but even these frequently span temporal intervals many times that of Caesar and Napoleon.
There is no use in talking even of such things as "life in Doggerland" - there was a Doggerland almost coated in glaciers, when only a small plain of tundra lay bare in the south, and a Doggerland of rich steppe, and a Doggerland of marsh and forest. 100 landscapes, 1000 cultures
There were people 28,000 years ago who found scraps of artifacts and walls of paintings almost as ancient and foreign to them as they are to us. There were cultures that rose and fell in spans of centuries that factor in modern studies only as the decimal-points of dates.
I sometimes visualise this vertigo by thinking of Google Maps and the satellite view. Then I try to picture the same landscape as it must have looked 6000 years ago - no towns, no roads, no fields, no divisions, no borders. The same hills & shores, yet... nothing visibly human.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Most reports from traditional agrarian societies are that people despised their subsistence farming life and would do anything to escape it. See for instance Blythe's Akenfield.
To be clear, I am also v wistful about the passing of the old countryside and rural traditions, and Akenfield is certainly full of old-timers mourning the passing of many venerable and beautiful things.
But it cannot be understated that the day-to-day for most was miserable.
Any serious grappling with the issue of farmland life and tradition - just like any serious engagement with the preservation of traditional culture among peoples like the African Bushmen or Maasai - must face up to the fact that most people did & do not want to live that way.
(1) Easter, like Christmas, Halloween and so many other Western festivals is field for a now-annual set of arguments over the holiday's "true" provenance - Christian or "really" pagan? Much of this roots in a murky and debatable figure - 'Ēostre'
(2) The common narrative for the "Easter is pagan" crowd is well-known at this point: Aside from the extreme cranks drawing references to Mesopotamian Ishtar, the story goes that Easter takes its name from a goddess known in Old English as 'Ēostre' and German as 'Ostara'
(3) With this is usually attached a host of extremely tenuous claims about the supposed connection of other Easter staples - Easter eggs, bunnies - with the cult of Ēostre. These have essentially nothing going for them, but debates about Easter often get bogged down here.
A fundamental tragedy of human society appears to be that certain core societal goods are almost invariably mutually exclusive.
For some reason, friendliness in a culture seems consistently opposed to politeness, joy and vitality rarely co-occurs with safety and contentment.
Anyone who has spent prolonged time in the less developed part of the world, f.ex. Africa, will know that people there are famously extremely friendly and hospitable. Total strangers with no wealth and little spare time will go out of their way to help you on a whim.
At the same time, as such a traveler would also know, this individual friendliness is mirrored by an equal impoliteness and chaos at the broader level. Drivers drive like madmen, govt officials are corrupt, restaurant waiters are cold, etc.
Debates about species reintroductions always bring out some of the most solipsistic and stubborn reactions in people. The discussion around brown bears in California seems a good microcosm of this - an extremely recent extinction (the last animal was seen exactly 100 years ago), it appears on the state flag. Nevertheless, many oppose the notion of reintroductions on the basis of the fact that bears, though shy and despite confrontations with humans being rare, could pose a potential danger to humans - which is true. Brown bears are large predators.
But if the people of California should not be subjected to living with such an "intolerable" risk, even a very minute one... why should those of Alaska? Of Wyoming? Idaho? If any danger posed to people by such an animal is morally unacceptable, surely the logic is very clear, that they should be wiped out everywhere, not merely in California.
Very few people have the guts to openly agree "dangerous animals should be hunted to extinction everywhere", but great numbers of people will confess what amounts to it - that they should be preserved sure, but over there. Where those other ppl live. Where they aren't my issue.
Ultimately this isn't really a position you can argue rationally with, as it isn't rational - it's emotional. Nearly everyone will concede, if pressed, that "O no, lions are too dangerous for me & my children! let the Indian farmers deal with them" is not a very noble position.
There's a very interesting & complicated sort of symbolism tied up in serpents and dragons in the ancient world, which manifests in this way - that dragons serve consistently as embodiments of two opposite elements, fire and water, & their dimensions, heaven & the underworld.
Disentangling this is difficult without coming off as slightly unhinged, but consider that there are 3 words which can mean variously "serpent" in ancient Hebrew - נָחָשׁ, שָׂרָף and תַּנִּין - "nakhash", "seraph" and "tannin"
All convey different connotations.
"nakhash" is the basic word for snake or serpent - it denotes the animal itself. "seraph" & "tannin" however are both words which can substitute for "serpent" more generally, but which also have specific and starkly opposed mythic meanings.
It's always interesting how people who talk about "grey morality" in fiction/storytelling almost never seem to actually know what this means.
A Song of Ice and Fire, Memory, Sorrow & Thorn, The First Law - these are not stories with grey morality! They are black and white.
This becomes clear enough if we ask the simple question "what do we mean when we say a story 'isn't black and white?'"
What ppl usually say they mean is that the story doesn't divide everything into a moral binary. But, well, don't they?
If everyone fails a math-test, that doesn't mean the test "no longer exists within a right-wrong binary". It simply means that no right answers exist. Likewise, just because a story, in the event, is full of wicked people, doesn't mean we aren't applying a moral binary.