Freeday 17 November 2000

Pic of the day: Screenshot from Civ2. (Scandinavia is supposed to be to the north, Britain to the west.)

For love of history

When I was a boy, and lived on the farm, I had a strange hobby. Well, not only one, but this too. I drew fantasy history maps. I would use any blank paper I could find. In the winter, we carried wood in from the barn to burn to keep our home warm; it was not so well insulated, at that time. The wood was taken inside in sacks consisting of several layers of tough paper; these sacks had been used for animal feed. Now they came into the house, and into my clutches. And I took the outermost layer, which was white on the inside, and on it I drew large maps. I drew oceans and coastlines and I particularly loved peninsulas. My favorite countries tended to look somewhat like Malaysia - not that I did know back then how Malaysia looked. That came later.

After I had drawn coastlines and rivers, I placed small cities on my maps. And I made the cities grow, by adding red color with a pen or pencil. And I made new cities, and drew borders, and I gave my countries names and pitted them against each other in wars. I drew new borders until the map was barely comprehensible to myself. Eventually when the map was pretty much unreadable, I discarded it and started anew. New coastlines, new rivers, new kingdoms.

I have never heard of anyone else who did this. And people wonder why I sometimes play Civilization till far into the night ... :)

***

"Those who fail history, are doomed to repeat it." When I was 15, I got access to Grimberg's world history, a huge work, a bookshelf full, and well written. I started at the beginning, at prehistory and the dawn of history. I wandered the streets of ancient Sumer, of Ur and Uruk, and in my mind's eye I saw the mighty ziggurats rising from the plains like stepped pyramids. Oh, I was impressed with the Pyramids too, and the chain of great empires that flourished along the Nile. But I think my heart was always most with the Sumerians, the blackheads as they called themselves. I always felt that they and not the Egyptians were our cultural ancestors.

I read about the refined Minoan culture on Crete, and its sudden end. From what I have gathered, it may have been destroyed in a single night like Atlantis of legend, when the volcano on Santorini exploded with a force greater than a heap of our largest nuclear bombs. Horrible waves crashed over the islands, and the surviving fishermen and traders who had been out on sea returned and found their home a ruin. The beautiful civilization disappeared forever (and with it the custom of bare breasted women in long skirts). The standards of sanitation reached the same level again approximately 50 years ago.

I read about the ancient Greeks and their all too human gods, their philosophers and their tyrants and their democracy and their slaves. Archimedes was my hero of that time, the tireless inventor genius. The Romans, through accident as much as anything, grew to rule the Mediterranean and all the lands around. They had the good fortune to have the right leaders at the right time, and to be tempered like steel by the blows of barbarians strong enough to test their mettle but not to destroy them. The fall of the Roman empire was a puzzle to me as it has been to many others. How much was due to their declining government, how much to exhausted natural resources, how much to the increased vigor of barbarians along their borders? And how did the rise of Christianity play in? While the western part of the empire crumbled, the eastern part remained well into medieval times. Why? I still don't know.

The middle ages were not the pitch black emptyness between two great ages. It was a time of restructuring. Rome had been urban; Europe of the middle ages was rural. The Renaissance seemed to release a flood of human genius. How comes that some times seem to be crowded with genius, while others seem almost empty of creativity? Gradually our modern world took shape. And gradually, I lost interest. I never liked to read "modern history" - the world wars and such. It never caught my fancy. I guess part of it was that it lacked the clarity. When time has passed and all are dead who took part in the shuffle, when no one feel part of it any longer, there is a certain clarity. Like a corpse that has rotted away until only the bleached bones are left, a cleaner and less ugly sight. A transformation into clarity.

***

Much later, in my thirties, I would have this strange feeling. No, not quite feeling. Attitude? Not sure what to call it. It started when I felt older than my years. I had to think to remember how old I was. I even on a couple occasions miswrote my birthday. I felt years older, then even older than that. Then I sort of split apart - not in a sense of clinical insanity, but I had a feeling of duality. One part was based on my personal memories, such as they were, my life in the body. The other part of me was the one that had walked the streets of Akkad and Babylon, of Athens and Rome. The one was all about me, the other identified with all of our civilization. The one lived in a basement, the other counted the world as its home.

To my immense delight, I found the autobiography of C.G. Jung, the renowned psychiatrist, where he told that he had felt this same duality from early childhood. One part of him was a child, but the other was immensely old and encompassing so much more. I wonder how common this is. I have seen no one else claim to share this experience.

Lately I have more or less re-integrated, I guess. And the personal part of me is more significant, now. I have added to my sense of self, bit by bit. But still, I am not sure that the memories of my childhood are as many, or even as vivid, as those of past empires, real and imagined. A part of me still feel that a few decades is simply not a decent lifespan. That thousands of years is a better perspective on things. But the body does not accomodate such a span of time, I am afraid.

Out of history come the very components we are built from. Not just the genes that make up our body, but the memes that make up our mind. The words of our language, and even its grammar. The traditions of wearing certain types of clothes, of building certain types of houses, of eating with a fork or with chopsticks. By and large, our identity is built from a toolkit out of the past. Created and assembled by bards and drunken tavern guests, fisher's wives and soldiers and whores, seamen and traders. And most of all farmers, I guess, for until recently most men were farmers. Perhaps that's why I feel this need to see things grow, this need to build something? Guess we shall never know.

Out of the past comes this cascade of small components; they assemble in a swirl of time and spirit and become us; then we leave, and the form that was ours dissolve back into the sea of history. Millions and millions of raindrops beat down on the surface of the sea; each of them create rings in the water, but most are lost moments later. Soon I am forgotten, my name and my shape and my thoughts. But history goes on, and we shall be part of it till the end of time.