The masks we wear; the crosses we bear, the choices we didn't know were ours to make and those we didn't realize weren't.
How special time is. Sometimes a moment stretches on for a year, and sometimes a year compresses behind our backs and by the time we look back the only thing there is the memory of a moment.
I can't imagine what would happen if man mastered gravity. If you were born ahead of your time maybe you could fly into a gravity well for what would seem like a couple minutes but by the time you return a thousand earth-years might have passed. But maybe what's important about the world won't change in a thousand years.
Some authorities have claimed that you could take a slave from ancient Egypt or even some hunter-gatherer from the Neolithic and they would have comparable intellect to a modern-day human. If we fundamentally remain the same for thousands of years then it makes our general obsession with recency seem kind of silly.
What stands out about not just the Neolithic peoples but all peoples throughout history is the things they left behind that were most interesting to look at and actually think about was their art. Now that is some timeless stuff right there. What does a Sumerian contract for a shipment of grains tell me about the Sumerians? Not half as much as staring at a little clay bar with their whole origin mythology stamped into it. That's what Epic of Gilgamesh was about, wasn't it--the struggle to reconcile the primal desires of man with his need to be civilized?
Maybe on a long enough timeline, archaeologists will look back on us here now and lump us in with the Sumerians--just another bunch of incompleted souls trying to forget about death while learning how to live.
How special time is. Sometimes a moment stretches on for a year, and sometimes a year compresses behind our backs and by the time we look back the only thing there is the memory of a moment.
I can't imagine what would happen if man mastered gravity. If you were born ahead of your time maybe you could fly into a gravity well for what would seem like a couple minutes but by the time you return a thousand earth-years might have passed. But maybe what's important about the world won't change in a thousand years.
Some authorities have claimed that you could take a slave from ancient Egypt or even some hunter-gatherer from the Neolithic and they would have comparable intellect to a modern-day human. If we fundamentally remain the same for thousands of years then it makes our general obsession with recency seem kind of silly.
What stands out about not just the Neolithic peoples but all peoples throughout history is the things they left behind that were most interesting to look at and actually think about was their art. Now that is some timeless stuff right there. What does a Sumerian contract for a shipment of grains tell me about the Sumerians? Not half as much as staring at a little clay bar with their whole origin mythology stamped into it. That's what Epic of Gilgamesh was about, wasn't it--the struggle to reconcile the primal desires of man with his need to be civilized?
Maybe on a long enough timeline, archaeologists will look back on us here now and lump us in with the Sumerians--just another bunch of incompleted souls trying to forget about death while learning how to live.
