"...my walk should have eased me somewhat, restored that perspective which Patrol agents must have, lest certain of the things they witness drive them mad. We must understand that what Pascal said is true of every human being in the whole of space-time, ourselves included - 'The last act is tragic, however pleasant all the comedy of the other acts. A little earth on our heads and all is done with forever.' - understand it in our bones, so that we can live with it calmly if not serenely."
- 1935, p. 343.
I accept what Pascal said although there are many who do not. But why is this perspective particularly appropriate for Patrol agents? It is obviously appropriate for everyone. However, Carl Farness routinely passes back and forth between the 300s and the 1930s. Every time that he is in the 1930s, everyone who was alive in the 300s is long dead. Also, he sees several generations pass in the 300s. With his indefinitely extended lifespan, a Patrol agent must be acutely conscious of the mortality of everyone else - and must also remember his own.
The equivalent passage in another Poul Anderson time travel novel is:
"In awe he felt a sense of that measureless river which he could swim but on which she could only be carried from darkness to darkness."
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), IX, p. 98.
10 comments:
One of the drawbacks to our current culture is that we sweep mortality under the rug, so it comes as a shock to encounter it.
Death is something that happens in a special building, and people can go their entire lives without seeing a corpse.
I went most of my life without seeing a human corpse, until the funerals of my parents.
However, when I was a child a bird ran into my bedroom window, broke its neck & fell onto the roof on a lower part of the house. My dad decided to leave the body there so his children could see what happens to a corpse in nature, flies laying eggs in it, then later maggots then a small skeleton. Definitely educational.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I've outlived most of my family, including being present at my mother's death, so I've seen deceased persons. But not, I admit, in the messy and gruesome ways seen on battlefields!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: I stepped over dead and dying famine victims in the street when I was about 10...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that was horrible and tragic. I assume this was one of the places where your father was posted while in the Army.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: no, Kenya in the 60's.
That was after he completed his career in the Royal Canadian Air Force and switched to the Foreign Aid department; that was why we lived in Kenya for a number of years.
You get a different sense of the parameters of life if you grow up in a place with -real- poverty... of the 'dying because there's no food' type.
It's different from a place where obesity is characteristic of 'the poor'.
The diversity of human experience is extraordinary. And people initially accept whatever is presented to them as the norm. During Margaret Thatcher's Prime Ministership, Ted Heath appeared on TV. Somewhere in Britain, an adult told a child, "That man was one of the Prime Ministers before Thatcher." The child replied, "Were men allowed to do it then?"
Mind you, until 1945, about half the population of Britain experienced malnutrition at least occasionally. My father remembered children begging for cod tongues at the fishing docks in Newfoundland when he was a kid.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: Thanks for your explanation. And I'm a bit surprised about the famine in Kenya, because I thought it would be one of the more prosperous nations of Africa.
What you said about people in the UK at least sometimes enduring malnutrition at least sometimes until 1945 must have been true of the US, at least when times were hard.
the US, where the rich starve and the poor gets fat! (Smiles wryly)
Paul: Margaret Thatcher was PM for eleven years, so I would many children to remember her as the first PM they really knew about!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
My daughter was one of "Thatcher's Children." She had not known any other PM so it was a big deal for her when Thatcher resigned like for me and many others when the Queen died.
Paul.
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