"The hospital building might well be a hundred years old..." (p. 439)
A hundred years is a long time for a building? The text continues:
"...brick dark with grime, windows not lately washed." (ibid.)
That is bad. In fact, for a hospital, it is atrocious. The text continues:
"The modernization inside was minimal. This was for the poor, the indigent, the victims of accident and violence. Its neighbors were as drab. The traffic that rumbled and screeched about them was mostly commercial and industrial. The air was foul with its fumes." (ibid.)
A graphic description of an unhealthy environment. Society and its members need better health provision for everyone.
I have said before that I thought that the "rescuing Aliyat from hospital" passage did not need to be included in the novel but I am finding other aspects of the passage to comment on.
Good description: grime; unwashed windows; minimal modernization; screeching traffic; foul fumes. An untidy street is not art but a picture or a description of it is!
29 comments:
Let's put it this way: in Shakespeare's day, London had 5 burials for every baptism...
So things are better now than then.
Kaor, Paul!
Also, that hospital would be considered wildly advanced when considered to what was available in, say, 1825. Also, my recollection is that Aliyat was getting at least competent care and treatment in that hospital
I read the 20th century chapters of BOAT with special interest because of how seldom Anderson wrote stories or parts of stories set in, more or less, our contemporary times. And that reminds me of THE DEVIL'S GAME, another rare 20th century story by Anderson.
Ad astra! Sean
I think we can now aim at better for everyone!
Paul: needs are infinite. Resources always finite. Therefore, any system which allocates resources needs to set priorities.
Eg., getting good hospital treatment is sort of futile if someone hits you over the head to take your wallet when you get out and start home.
I think we can work towards much greater resources and also different priorities in their allocation. Two different questions are: What can we do better now? and: What can we work towards in the future? We have got the whole Solar System at least. (If we know what to do with it.)
Maybe two aspects of need:
Needs grow. For their fullest personal and social development, people need to have access to far more cultural resources than any one person can possibly consume in a very long lifetime. In my cultural background, I know that there are classic novels even if I never read any of them.
Basic needs can be more easily defined: food, shelter etc. Not everyone has these yet. Even basic needs grow. If we are to vote, then we need to be literate to read newspapers and also need access to other media to see and hear party political broadcasts. Apparently, in Britain, residents in old people's homes officially "need" a television. Even if some of them never look at it, or are too deaf to hear it!, they "need" to have access to it. But this much can be done.
"A hundred years is a long time for a building?"
As a saying goes:
In Europe a 100 km is a long distance, in America a 100 years is a long time.
Or: We have history. The US has geography.
There are discontinuities in history.
Eg., in 2500 BCE there was a migration to what's now Britain from what's now the NW Netherlands that produced a 93% genetic turnover throughout the British Isles in no more than a few centuries, and possibly as little as one. That was when Indo-European-derived languages were introduced to the British Isles.
That was the westward extension of a migration that began around 2900 BCE in eastern Germany and western Poland and ended up reformatting everything from Ireland to the Tien Shan; it ultimately produced the Indo-Aryan peoples and everything -they- did, too.
It's the reason there's a language called Hindi in India now... and a reason so many Indian males carry the genetic marker R1a.
There had been a similar turnover when migrants brought agriculture to the British Isles -- migrants ultimately derived from Anatolia, mainly. That happened around 4000 BCE.
Recent ancient DNA research has also shown that the Anglo-Saxon migrations to England after 400 CE resulted in a very high degree of genetic turnover -- 75% on the east coast, as high as 40% as far west as the border with Wales.
This leaves me a bit vague as to where the Aryans came from.
The Aryans started with the Sintashta culture, which evolved from the easternmost fringe of the Corded Ware dispersal, which started 3000-2900 in eastern Germany and western Poland, with Yamnaya-related people coming north over the Carpathians and mingling (a bit) with the locals around 3000 BCE.
After spreading westward from the Ukrainian steppe up the Danube Valley and into the Hungarian basin, and also south from there down into the Balkans and Greece.
Then the new Corded Ware culture spread explosively east and west and by about 2100 BCE their easternmost fringe was over the Urals in what's now Chelyabinsk Oblast, and there they evolved into the original Indo-Aryans -- the Sintashta and Andronovo cultures.
So the Corded Ware were ancestral to the Celts, the Germanics, the Balts, the Slavs, and the Indo-Aryans. Probably the Italics as well.
So the -original- Indo-Aryans did look like North Europeans... 8-).
Not being National Socialists, of course, they mingled freely with people in the south Asian areas they migrated to. You can still trace their genes, though.
Incidentally this is why a lot of early archaeologists thought the Proto-Indo-European homeland was in eastern Europe, in Poland/Germany.
It wasn't -- it seems to be fairly definitely in the Ukraine -- but a lot of the Indo-European -expansion- was based there in Germany/Poland.
The Yamnaya expanded vigorously, their offspring the Corded Ware (aka "Battle Axe" culture) did so even more vigorously -- eastward through the forest-steppe zone, north of the original Yamnaya expansion, and west to Ireland.
Ancient DNA has shown this because the Corded Ware skeletons carry neolithic and paleolithic European genes as well as the Yamnaya ones.
Incidentally the Sintashta invented the battle chariot, sometime around 2200 BCE. It spread very fast!
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: And I agree with Stirling, needs and wishes are infinite, and the resources and means needed for satisfying those needs are always going to be limited. Meaning some system for allocating those resources are going to be needed. Also, I don't put all that much stock in "culture" satisfying everybody.
Mr. Stirling: Fascinating, these comments about the Indo-Europeans and their forebears.
Ad astra! Sean
Well, ok. I thought that the Aryans came from Asia.
Sean,
You seem to think that many (most?) people have very limited intellectual and cultural needs!
We are finite albeit dynamic beings living in the midst of a vast universe, maybe an infinite multiverse. Why should resources be limited? Look up with sf, not down with the mundanes.
But this feels like one of those endless arguments. Each participant just sticks to his position and automatically replies to whatever is said on the other side until argumentative points are being repeated.
Paul.
Paul: they became Aryans (the name means roughly "Noble Free Ones") in Asia, just barely -- over the Urals.
Their -ancestors- (linguistic, and largely genetic) started out in Poland/Germany and they were closely related to many European ethnic groups.
In 2000 BCE you could have walked (with an occasional short boat trip) from Ireland to east of the Urals and there would have been no sharp distinction of either appearance or language along the way -- it would have been a dialect-chain, with language differing very slowly as you walked.
That is, the far ends of the journey might not have been comprehensible to each other, but each village or homestead along the way would have been able to talk to its neighbors east and west, tho' the process of differentiation was underway. That was just too long a distance for linguistic innovations to spread.
Eg., the Indo-Aryans, Slavs and Balts shared a process where initial "k" sounds from the ancestral language became an "s" sound -- it's called satemization in linguistics, and it started sometime within a short temporal distance either side of 2000 BCE.
The Tocharians in the Tarim basin, who were a product of a slightly earlier Yamnaya expansion didn't undergo that, which mightily puzzled early linguists studying their language.
The people would have lived much the same, too -- more agriculture in some places, more pastoralism in some other, but basically the same social organization -- a pre-State chieftain-dominated culture, a similar religion, and savagely warlike even by primitive standards.
Jim: in America, most buildings were not made to last. Eg., wood-frame with 2x4's.
Kaor, Paul!
Exactly, because I am more skeptical about human beings, at least in the mass, than you are. What are most people going to do, assuming a post scarcity economy, if they can live comfortably on Citizen's Credit, Basic Share, or whatever??? I don't believe arts or sports are going to satisfy most people for long!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But you are thinking of people as they have been and are, not as they can be in completely different circumstances. So much of what people do is what they expect to do because of what has been presented to them. There is no abstract human being independent of all social conditions.
Frankly, if people freed from drudgery cannot be satisfied by any input or activity, then there is no point to human existence and mass suicide is the only option. Absurd.
Paul.
Sean,
Try to imagine not people living comfortably on Credit but people educated to identify their psychological needs and preferred activities, then trained in the skills necessary for those activities. Imagine activity, not passivity. Imagine the vast resources of technology and of solar energy deployed not for conflict, waste and redundancy but for the needs, physical, psychological and social, of everyone. Imagine something good, instead of something bad or at best neutral.
Paul.
BTW, we have said all this before, haven't we?
By now, I can anticipate counterarguments. The fact that something has not happened yet is no proof that it cannot happen at any time in an indefinite future. Things that had been impossible become possible. Evolution and history present many examples. Now there are unprecedented possibilities of further changes but also power structures that maintain an unstable status quo at all costs. There are possibilities but no certainties. (So, of course, I do not argue that any desired changes are also certain.)
"were not made to last. Eg., wood-frame with 2x4's"
Almost as short lived - steel reinforced concrete. when the steel rebar starts to rust, it expands & so cracks the concrete. Part of why Roman concrete structures are still around is the Romans didn't have steel reinforcing & built concrete arches and domes with everything in compression.
In discussions about Trumps tariffs I saw it noted that steel mills are all specialized now & in N. America rebar with plastic coating, to retard rusting & so make concrete structures last longer, is all made in Canadian steel plants.
One among many reasons that tariffs on goods imported into the US will hurt the US economy at least as much as the economies of the countries the US had been importing from.
See also: Canada mines more potash for fertilizer than any other country. US farmers need that.
Cheap hydroelectricity makes Aluminum refined in Canada cheaper than refining it in the US.
I suppose I could look up similar issues with Mexico.
Kaor, Paul and Jim!
Paul: We are going to have to agree to disagree about human beings and their economics. I don't believe in the realism or plausibility of what you hope for.
My view remains that of Anderson in "Quixote and the Windmill" and Chapter Six of GENESIS.
Jim: My view remains that if Canada makes concessions about the issues which has been angering so many in the US those tariffs DC has been threatening Ontario about will be shelved. We shall see.
Ad astra! Sea
Sean,
"Quixote and the Windmill" shows a transitional period when of course there is dissatisfaction.
The basic disagreement is about whether there can be anything fundamentally unchanging and unchangeable in a perpetually changing universe.
Paul.
Sean: My view is that Trump just likes bullying
Kaor, Jim!
My view is a lot of the world should be bullied.
Ad astra! Sean
The only way for me to not be disgusted by the comment is to assume you mean by 'bully' something very different from what I mean.
To me a bully is someone who is cruel for he sake of cruelty, he simply enjoys hurting people.
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