I recently reached an odd conclusion. A sense of history isn’t about knowing a lot of history or trying to learn from the past in order to create a better future. It is about living your mortal life as though you were immortal.
To understand why this is an interesting definition to play with, consider the following allegory. Human life is like walking into a movie halfway through, and having to walk out again two minutes later. You’ll have no idea what’s going on when you walk in. And chances are, just as you begin to get a clue, you’ll be kicked out.
So unless you are lucky enough to walk in during a scene that is satisfying without any longer narrative context (think sex or violence), your ability to derive satisfaction from your two-minute glimpse will depend partly on your ability to construct meaning out of it.
One way to do this is to pretend to be immortal. This game of make-believe also reveals a few interesting things about literal immortality seeking, in the sense of seeking longevity therapies or waiting to upload your brain into Skynet, post-Singularity.
To pretend to be immortal is to approach your limited two-minute glimpse of the movie as though you’ve been watching all along, and as though you might stick around to see how it all ends.You will have to manufacture unverifiable memories and unfalsifiable foreshadowings. You will have to devote some of your limited time whispering to your neighbors, and perhaps surreptitiously looking up reviews with spoilers on your cellphone.
But at least you’ll walk out with a satisfying story, even if not the story. So long as you walk away feeling like you’ve just enjoyed an entire movie, it doesn’t matter.
To do this at the level of an entire life is to spend much of your time having one-way conversations with the dead and the unborn, through books read and written. You inhabit a world of ghosts while walking among the living.
These choices can lead to the sort of detachment and withdrawal from everyday life that we associate with seers, even if you don’t spend your time chasing profundities. You can seek this sort of pretend-immortality through stamp collecting or escapist fantasies.
These choices can also lead to odd patterns of identification with, and attachment to, dead or unborn cultures and people. It can lead to a sense of connection to larger human realities that is not purely genealogical. They can lead to social identities that make no sense to anyone, but are not exactly individualist either. They can make the contemporary living around you resentful and angry about your withdrawn, ghostly lifestyle.
The small difference between this kind of ghostly, vicarious immortality seeking and the literal kind is that in this kind, pretending is often enough.
The big difference is that sense-of-history seekers not only want to live forever, they want to have lived forever.
The sense of loss they feel about missing the invention of the wheel in 3000 BC is as poignant as the sense of loss they feel about missing the first interstellar human space mission in 2532 AD.
But this is only a symptom, the real difference lies deeper.
by Venkat, Ribbonfarm | Read more:
Images via: here and here
