Burn These Words
Words are important, so we’ll start with two quotes about them.
“Planily he said, Burn these words. He said a mute people will leave behind good stout architecture, and not their squalid lives of trial. ”
“It’s a huge problem when you try to interpret a civilization without written texts....So if you’re an Englishman and you see big stone uprights like this, you’re going to think Stonehenge. If you’re from the Mediterranean, you’re going to think olive press. So that’s a salutary example I think of the dangers of interpreting physical evidence when you don’t have written evidence to go along with it”
I started reading La Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver several weeks ago when I was in Mexico and earlier this week I started listening to the Lex Fridman podcast episode with guest historian Gregory Aldrete for episode 443: The Roman Empire - Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome.
By kismet design I finished them both within a day and had I not consumed the ending of each, where the two quotes above appeared, in such short succession, I might not have made the connection which produced these thoughts.
Lucky you, fate has birthed a blog post.
So here we are..
I spend a lot of time thinking about history, the construct of religion in society, and religious mythology across cultures and time. This primed me for these two quotes to stand out across the 4 hour podcast and 680 page book.
Aldrete, a historian, shares that when modern people discover ancient items, we often label them as cult or religious objects. In reality we don’t know what it is, yet want to ascribe it a level of importance.
He cites an example where a German with an English education travels to Northern Africa, finds 10 foot stone structures reminiscent of Stonehenge and deduces that the Celtic people must have descended from this region - he even writes a book about it. When you ask locals, they will tell you those are the old Roman olive oil factories. There is no connection with the Celtics.
WIthout written context of the past we are left filling in huge gaps about previous people; not just their stone structures but their lives (squalid or not) in total.
La Lacuna is a novel whose main character, Harrison Shepherd, a Mexican-American writer publishes books centering around the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
The Novem La Lacuna itself follows decades of Shepherd’s life experience living between Mexico and America in the 1920s through 1950s and his unexpected involvement with famous artists, famous Russian revolutionists, and his service for the US government. Through personal journals he has well documented his life, which during the Cold War posed high risk for himself and those around him.
For Shepherd, it is the documentation of his own history he seeks to escape. To leave only the stone remains of his life with no trace of his story.
A proliferation of context/content
Humans existed for millennia before writing systems existed which leaves us little context to understand their true way of living.
There are years of history which were recorded on materials which did not persist to modern day, and what we do have recorded from ancient times is fragmented and still contains huge gaps requiring lots of assumptions and hypotheses.
Within my lifetime there has been a dramatic shift in the way we document our lives. My childhood in the 90s is captured predominately on film which was all printed out and stored in boxes that live in closets. I wrote letters to my friends in middle school which we exchanged physically as we passed through the halls. These too live in boxes in closets.
Today we take thousands more pictures which all live in the cloud. Printing something often feels like an inconvenience. Who owns a printer?
We write emails and share google docs with thoughts and itineraries. We have passwords and apps to remember our passwords. We attach files, we grant permissions to view to comment to edit, but what is any of it ever really exists in a way to record our modern way of life.
When we are gone, what will they find? We think about Atlantis, we think about Olympus, will they think about our mystical cloud?
What they will find are mountains of hardware, server farms of hard disks and wires filled with fiber that physically connects us all but really doesn’t serve to connect humanity in a lasting way.
What will they really be able to intuit of our kind?
Adding to the digital repository
I didn’t timestamp all of the moments I liked of the Roman Empire Podcast, but it’s worth a listen if that’s your realm of interest. I did, however, when traveling without a pen, dog ear several pages and mark passages in the margin with my thumbnail while reading La Lacuna.
“Luckily the Spaniards wrote buckets about the Azteca civilization before they blew it to buttons and used its stones for their churches…If only mother had brought us here five hundred years sooner.” - page 69
“At the head of the table by a bowl of pomegranates, Señora Bartolome had put a note: Take only one, our Lord Jesus is watching! A second note appeared at the end of the table beside the sugared almonds: Take all you want, our Jesus is looking at the pomegranates.” - page 83
“They said it was to be a revolutionary free house, free of class struggle, no servants’ rooms because they didn’t believe in laundry maids or cooks. Nobody does, really. Why should they? Only in having clean clothes, clean floors and enchiladas tapatías.” - page 155
“As the fly said sitting on the back of the ox, ‘We are plowing this field!’” - page 165
“The radio is at the root of the evil, their rule is: No silence, ever. When anything happens, the commentator has to speak without a moment’s pause for gathering wisdom. Falsehood and inanity are preferable to silence. You can’t imagine the effect of this. The talkers are rising above the thinkers.” - page 429
“When that bomb went off over Japan, when we saw that an entire city could be turned to fire and gas, it changed the psychology of this country. And when I say ‘psychology,’ I mean that very literally. It’s the radio, you see. The radio makes everything feel the same thing at the same time. Instead of millions of carious thoughts, one big psychological fixation. The radio commands our gut response.” - page 490
“Artie nods thoughtfully. ‘I take your point. People think lawyers are a cutthroat gang, and me, I couldn’t cut the throat of a fish. Margaret says I should take up fishing. and I think, an old softie like me? What would I do if I caught one? Apologize?’” - page 509
“Because if you had to go dit on a grave and think hard about it, you couldn’t just say ‘This is America.’ Some Indian would cross your mind, some fellow that shot his arrow on that very spot. Or the man that shot the Indian, or whipped his slaves or hung up some tart woman for a witch. You couldn’t just say it’s all fine and dandy.” - page 531
“Traces of paint clung to the surfaces too: ged, green, violet. In their time, all these buildings were brightly painted. What a shock to realize that, and how foolish to have been tricked earlier by the serenity of white limestone. Like looking at a skeleton and saying, ‘How quiet this man was, and how thin,’” - page 534
and Where do you even start writing a story? Start where it ends..
I’d suggest both the book and the podcast if you’re in the mood for some long form content!
