A new viewpoint character, Chuan, reflects:
"Seventy-one years - thirty-eight on the calendar here - seems a bit early to start sighing for a day when everything was young.
"Nor would I go back through time if I could." (p. 90)
Age is an opportunity for reminiscence and nostalgia but also for reflection and understanding. At school, we read a French passage about an old man sitting in a park in Paris. It happens that the park and the visible part of the city have not changed noticeably since his childhood. He remembers a boy running eagerly through the park on his first day back at school after the summer holiday. He remembers what the boy was thinking so obviously the boy was him although described throughout in the third person. Among other things, the boy wants to ask a particular named friend whether he has ridden horses in the mountains as he had said he would. When the passage ends, the old man looks at the park, remembers that boy and thinks, "Only he has changed."
Does the man really wish that he was that boy again? Personally, I prefer the experience of age to the inexperience of youth although I do not denigrate people younger than me now. They seem to be much better informed than I ever was. Besides, it is an illusion that only the boy has changed. France and Europe would have gone through immense changes during that man's lifetime.
4 comments:
Though in most times and places, the man's grandson would be running around while he watched and would have pretty much the same life to look forward to.
That's why a consciousness of historical change is relatively recent. It only really caught on in Europe in the Renaissance; as late as the end of the 16th century, a well-read man like Shakespeare has cannon and clocks chiming the hours in 11th-century Denmark.
(Whereby hangs a tale in Poul's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.)
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: But those "great changes" you mentioned was only possible because of Western civilization being so dynamically willing to change as we see it has been doing since at least the 1400's, with the age of exploration, discovery, invention of a true science, etc. A development which had many roots and causes, as we see Anderson discussing in some detail in IS THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS? and more briefly in "Delenda Est." Before then civilizations changed VERY slowly.
Mr. Stirling: I am not sure you are correct about how Shakespeare read back into the past such things as chiming clocks and cannon existing in 11th century Denmark. I think true mechanical clocks were only invented in Europe (Italy?) a bit before 1200. And I think the first crude "bombards" were only being used in the later 1300's. I think Shakespeare was indulging in "artistic license" setting such things so far back in the past.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: more probably he just didn't think about it; they'd been around in his grandfather's time, so he assumed that they always had been. A real historical scholar of that time wouldn't have made that mistake -- and artists had started showing people in ancient times in different clothes just a lifetime or so before Shakespeare was born.
But as late as the early 19th century, it was possible for an educated man to say that the Gothic cathedrals were built at the time of the Viking invasions, or to assume that King Arthur's warriors wore plate armor.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Your suggestion is almost certainly more likely than mine, Shakespeare simply took clocks and cannon for granted. Yes, a real scholar knowledgeable in history in his time would have known better.
And, similarly, a real historian living in 1810 would also have known Gothic architecture and plate armor were later than the Viking invasions.
Ad astra! Sean
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