Time

For we, the immortals, it seems a tragedy that so many of our fellow humans have died and will continue to die. Each of those lives was as precious and important to its owner as mine is to me, as yours is to you, and yet while their time on this Earth was limited, I (and perhaps you - we are few in number, and nobody reads my blog anyway...) will live on, watching the aeons pass, seeing civilizations rise and fall, miraculous discoveries and inventions made (I predict nanoscale wind turbines in the anal passage, powering embedded wetware which provides us with a continuous feed of everything that's happening everywhere right now on the ground as it happens. And sprout wars.), making my own philanthropic contributions here and there (... isn't this the plot of a Simone de Beauvoir novel? Ah yes, All Men Are Mortal (thanks memory)).

I often seek different perspectives as a way of crow-barring some meaning into life. Consider recent human history - or rather prehistory, preagriculture. Consider those generations of people who were anatomically and cognitively identical to modern humans, yet whose lives were lived in small groups of hunter gatherers (as some still do now in certain parts of the world). How would they have thought of the future and their relationship to it? We in the modern world are locked into the idea of progress and have been for centuries. There is a sense, so deeply ingrained that it has become invisible, that we are going somewhere, that our civilization will continue unbroken into the far future in a process not just of change but of improvement, improvement for everyone, eventually, probably.

Viewed from space there is merely, century after century, a change in the arrangement of physical matter (to borrow Beaty Russel's idea) on the surface of the earth, but for us down here these rearrangements are associated with our hopes and dreams, daily needs, work and play. When I think about my own life, my own possible futures, they must necessarily find their form within the larger forms of 'progress' to a better tomorrow - or at the very least the forms of 'maintenance' of what we have now. But when I think back to those nasty, idyllic, brutish, halcyon prehistoric hunter-gatherer days, I can't help feeling that that was the default form, the correct form, the non-aberrant form, which we must necessarily return to over and over as civilizations continue to collapse and reemerge. It is like a pulse, a leap to nowhere, a slow encrustation and sloughing off on the surface of the earth - civilization - primitive - civilization - primitive.

Of course, it is only from the perspective of a modern post-prehistoric mind that such thoughts can be had, but then I wouldn't need their solace if I was out worrying a wildebeest.