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hawkwing_lbWe are fragile, stubborn, transient things.
I walked up the north strand this afternoon. A chill pale light suffusing everything, from the tattered clouds to the steel sea, misting into the distances. The inrushing waves foamed very white as they spent themselves on the damp sand, and underfoot, ice smeared the rocks, making them cold and treacherous. The smell of seaweed and brine and the fishy smell of the harbour hung on the still air.
I forget, you know, that we live overlaid on history, walking on the bones of our past. The hulk of the Napoleonic Martello tower on the headland, black in the fading light, the fields that have been fields far longer than anyone recalls, the stoney reconstructed edifice of Bremore Castle, scaffolded beyond the playing fields, the stone cairn near the tumbled seventeenth-century pier, in the lee of Bremore Head, the headland where the pair of 5000 year old passage tombs mound themselves in grassy humps, and stare eternally north over the sea. The quality of silence, broken only by the crunch of boots on icy shingle.
But we do. The past is beside us always, a heartbeat, a corner, a sidelong glance away.
The government wants to build a port on that land, an unnecessary development if ever there was one, and so fields and sea and cairn and pier may themselves all fall to history, swallowed by the future. And so the future overlays the past, layer after layer: wiping away, burying, uncovering, reusing, treasuring, destroying.
What use is the past, if we cannot touch it? What value has the past to the future? Do mere objects, memories, footprints of the nameless, voiceless, dead: do they have worth, in and of themselves?
I believe they do, but I'm a historian by preference. I'm prejudiced that way.
The fire's lighting in the hearth, the cat's sleeping on the couch, and I've done work on my thesis for virtue's sake. Tonight it will freeze again, Perhaps tomorrow I'll wander into town, browse teas and books, contemplate the heart of winter and how very good it is to be able to be inside, and warm.
I walked up the north strand this afternoon. A chill pale light suffusing everything, from the tattered clouds to the steel sea, misting into the distances. The inrushing waves foamed very white as they spent themselves on the damp sand, and underfoot, ice smeared the rocks, making them cold and treacherous. The smell of seaweed and brine and the fishy smell of the harbour hung on the still air.
I forget, you know, that we live overlaid on history, walking on the bones of our past. The hulk of the Napoleonic Martello tower on the headland, black in the fading light, the fields that have been fields far longer than anyone recalls, the stoney reconstructed edifice of Bremore Castle, scaffolded beyond the playing fields, the stone cairn near the tumbled seventeenth-century pier, in the lee of Bremore Head, the headland where the pair of 5000 year old passage tombs mound themselves in grassy humps, and stare eternally north over the sea. The quality of silence, broken only by the crunch of boots on icy shingle.
But we do. The past is beside us always, a heartbeat, a corner, a sidelong glance away.
The government wants to build a port on that land, an unnecessary development if ever there was one, and so fields and sea and cairn and pier may themselves all fall to history, swallowed by the future. And so the future overlays the past, layer after layer: wiping away, burying, uncovering, reusing, treasuring, destroying.
What use is the past, if we cannot touch it? What value has the past to the future? Do mere objects, memories, footprints of the nameless, voiceless, dead: do they have worth, in and of themselves?
I believe they do, but I'm a historian by preference. I'm prejudiced that way.
The fire's lighting in the hearth, the cat's sleeping on the couch, and I've done work on my thesis for virtue's sake. Tonight it will freeze again, Perhaps tomorrow I'll wander into town, browse teas and books, contemplate the heart of winter and how very good it is to be able to be inside, and warm.
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no subject
Date: 2009-12-27 03:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-27 12:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-28 02:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-28 07:17 pm (UTC)The future exists independent of what we know about the past. In a sense, there is no real continuum of human experience: we're living in a constant present, in which a moment ago is a state of being already lost beyond recovery. The past has no functional use: to seek to define or to preserve it is aesthetics only.
But to me the value of history lies in empathy. History is the study of past things, movements, events - but above all the study of past people. And to me, the cognisance of the vast yet ultimately tiny sweep of human history set against the world and the cosmos - that's where I find the numinous, the sacred.
We're all brief candle-flickers in the dark. And so we preserve the memory of those who went before us, in the hope that something of us might be preserved in our turn. And if in doing so we learn something more about the world, about other people, and about ourselves: well, that's important, too.
If that makes any sense.