i love both you and the german language way too much
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Dienstag, August 28, 2007
It makes me sad to think about Hale-Bopp returning in 4377. I'm not sure what it is. I guess I'm trying to imagine the scene, people all over the world turning out to see the comet, just like we did, and reflecting on it's last passing--probably they'll still have photos of it--thinking about what it meant to people in 1997. And the distance is making me sad. I can't create a picture of the future-people, what sort of dwellings they'll come out of to look at the sky, what the future equivalent of cheesy History Channel documentaries will be, what they will and won't be able to recover of our old TV footage and pictures about the comet, and what kinds of mass media they will or won't be incorporating such records into. I don't even know if I'm focusing on the unimaginable things that will really define their distance from me, when they reflect on 2380 years ago. It's a lot of distance. And maybe the real problem is imagining a world with no trace of me or anyone I've ever known. There won't be anyone distinguishably related to any of us. The magnitude of the things you have to do to be a household name thousands of years after your death! Found a major religion or be Alexander the Great, basically. It kind of makes me want to write books or be a philosopher, so there's a chance of my influencing someone's life or thought way down the line. Even if I manage to achieve something as a geologist, even if I learn something with such widespread and important results that people still read about it in some college geology courses in 4377, no one will read about it and have their life changed, even for a few days. I guess this is what Aaron Becker has been talking about; the greater societal impact of great acheivments in the sciences and the greater personal impact of those in the humanities.
I guess I could become an astronomer and study comets while living a life somehow unusual and story-worthy outside of my work; then maybe a biography will be written about me and I'll have a chapter in some book about crazy comet-lovers, and some future-geek who's really into comets will find me a kindred spirit and reflect upon the fact that I would have been 10 years old and living in Connecticut when Hale Bopp last passed close to Earth. Not a good way to go, though.
They're people, but they're not my people. I have a hard time empathising with them--what's empathy beyond pretending to be another person? I don't know what clothes to dress myself up in or what attitudes to try to understand (as I write this, I imagine the children at the PCM, playing in the time tunnel, pretending to be children from the past, perhaps, but more often pretending to be pirates).
If the return of Hale-Bopp is scary, how much worse to try to imagine the end of humanity, whatever mass extinction event gets us. I'm having an even harder time figuring out and describing what speaks to me about the idea of the end of the world-for-people, and I'm tired, so i'll stop now. Maybe I'll think about it more later, but I would bet most blogpromises to write more later are never fulfilled, and the one I'm not making now probably won't be, either.
If I do lots of ridiculous things in old age, maybe I can expect my grandchildren to tell their grandchildren about me. I guess that's the best we can realistically do. Why does it matter? Am I only as self-centered as my humanness explains, or am I additionally self-centered as a young human, like my mother thinks?
1:01 AM
Donnerstag, August 09, 2007
I wish I knew whether I have this Children's Museum job already. The useless waiting and unsureness and continually frustrated anticipation is doing nothing for my mood.
3:47 PM
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