I suppose, technically speaking, we all have the same amount of history... the billion-year-old-earth (or 6,000 years, if you like), the birth of humanity, the various exoduses, the rise and fall of cultures - as humans, I guess we can all lay claim to our collective history.
And the history of humanity in the Americas is, of course, a long one - nowhere near as long as humanity in Africa, of course, but still a long and fascinating and often tragic history.
But for me, personally, I have a sense that the historical context for my own life began sometime in the 1700s... maybe the 1600s, but no earlier. Beyond that, it is the history of other people, and unfathomably long ago.
So I am having to adjust to the scale of history and time in this city, where CaerLudein/Londinium/London has sat at this spot on the Thames for thousands of years, and where a professor says casually "It wasn't much more than 500 years ago when..." and I miss the rest of the sentence for shock that a half-millenium is dismissed as barely any time at all.
(He also said, and I quote, "I have detained you for somewhat longer than I had expected. I now recommend that we stop for 20 minutes or so." Oh, British formality!)
You wrote in part: "the historical context for my own life began sometime in the 1700s... maybe the 1600s, but no earlier"
ReplyDeleteI respond: What? As if the Battle of Hastings had nothing to do with it? Our language (and thus the way we think) is riddled with the consequences of old French merging with old English (those may not be the exact terms to define the languages at that time). And what about Roman contribution to the idea (not unique to them of course) of empire by conquest followed by assimilation into a civic system with an administrative hierarchy spanning vasts distances. Once you admit Rome, then surely you step back to Greece and the idea of the citizen with a separate unique voice (the origin of our idea of the self)-- and once you get there then pretty soon you move through Old Testament stories and find yourself at Gilgamesh-- What about Gilgamesh and him chopping down the Tree of Life? Aren't we still doing that just in very slow motion?
Perhaps you were really just referring to books and clothing styles when you said the context of your life began in the 1700s.
well, if you extend your quotations marks a little, you'll note I said I had a sense that... I didn't say it was right!
ReplyDeleteOn an intellectual level, I've spent most of my college career discussing how the 'long ago and far away' still influence our lives. but usually, they still FEEL very long ago and far away. in my mind's filing cabinet, events a thousand years ago are filed somewhere different than the politics of the past hundred years, even though they are connected - I mean, I also sort chemistry and cooking into separate spheres even though they, too, are connected. at some point you have to split things up for sorting. and where I happen to draw the lines for "recent history," "distant history," and "incredibly ancient history" appears to be very different than how my instructor does it, and I would submit that being raised in a city that has been (nearly) continuously inhabited for a thousand years might affect your conception of just how long a thousand years is.
But yes, context was surely the wrong word. I should have focused on a sense of proximity.