I adore history. It’s one of my passions, and I wish I could do something with it as a career.
I think one of the reasons I love history so much is that it makes me feel immortal.
I think about death a lot. I can’t help it. I can never seem to avoid the fact that my life isn’t permanent and that someday I will die. It terrifies and saddens me, and death often feels just around the corner. My life sometimes feels too empty — I don’t allow myself very many luxuries, material or otherwise. But I don’t know which is the cause and which is the effect. Do I worry about my death because I don’t lead a rich enough life, or have I decided that it’s not worth trying to do or gain much in my lifetime because someday I’ll be dead? I probably have a good 50 years ahead of me, but I can’t seem to conceive of that length of time as very long. I feel like the last 10 years have flown by and I worry that the rest of my life will, too.
Yes, I really do think that way. This is what it’s like inside my head sometimes.
But I know that after I’m gone, history will still exist. And by studying history, I’m giving life to those who are long dead. When I study history, I feel like I’m communing with something permanent — unlike me, who will someday disappear. Studying and contemplating history feels almost spiritual to me.
For the last few weeks I’ve been reading Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud, by Peter Watson. It’s an intellectual history of humanity from the advent of bipedalism and stone tools to the dawn of the 20th century. (Watson has another book that covers the intellectual history of the 20th century.)
I’d like to think I’m learning a lot from this book, but I know that most of it is just washing over me, to be forgotten a few pages later. Still, I’m really enjoying it, because I’m getting a big-picture view of the trends of human history.
One of the weirder things I remember learning a long time ago is that we are currently living in a interglacial period in the middle of an ice age. The last 12,000 years have just been part of a warm respite in the middle of a longer ice age. All of recorded human history has occurred during an interglacial period.
It makes me wonder, what kind of age are we living in now? It depends on your altitude. Are we in the age of Obama? Or are we in a longer era of conservatism that began with Ronald Reagan? Pulling back from the ground a bit, are we in an age of democracy that began in the late 18th century, an era that we take for granted but will someday disappear? Or are we an age of individualism, humanism, and exploration that began with the Renaissance and will also disappear? Or maybe we’re in an age of monotheism that began a few thousand years ago?
Several hundred years or several millennia from now, what will people say about our era? Will the early 21st century be distinguishable from the 19th or the 20th or the 22nd or the 23rd? Or will we blend into some several-centuries-long period of time? Will future people even know about us?
Maybe all of human history is just a transitional phase. Maybe we’re just a vehicle for the creation of self-aware robots that will kill us and colonize the universe. Maybe they are the ultimate point of things. Or maybe they’ll use their unimaginably awesome intelligence to create even more amazing robots, and so on, until some super-super-duper species of computer ultimately discovers the purpose of Existence.
It’s common to look at the Earth and realize that we, and the Earth, and our solar system, are insignificant in the universe. But it’s not just a spatial insignificance; we’re temporally insignificant as well. The universe existed long before the Earth was formed and long before the Sun. It will exist even after the Sun goes supernova and swallows the Earth. That moment of supernova is inconceivably far into the future — but the universe will continue even after that.
Time is so… long.
