“Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot.” - Simon Schama (pictured above making cheese soufflet in his home)
I had a fine day today. I went to Tim Hortons, had Chocolate milk, listened to a good lecture by a genius historian (Prof. Sainsbury) and then had an actually good Latin class! craziness. Then I had a great lunch, and when I came home I decided I needed my Simon Schama fix so I lay down on the couch and watched him compare Ireland and India. He even talked about Thomas Babington Macaulay whom I had researched without remembering Schama talked about him.
Now I'm just waiting to go to work. It's been a good day, but it's weird having the fear of work and prospective essays looming over you. Then I realized: this is my life. I'm only viewing it on a daily cycle though. Like why should I relax the day before I work if I just have to work the next day? ANd I'll have to work my entire life, so really this, "just get through it" attitude is really the bane of my existence. What's the point in toughing out your entire life?
When I think about History and Schama and the job of a Historian I constantly think about how many people have gone before me. The Romans had a phrase we translated in Latin the other day. It was "to go to the majority", and it meant 'to die'. They saw the majority as those already dead. Schama said 1 million Irish died in the potato famine of the 1840s and 5 million people starved in India during one famine. 6 million people, dead.
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What were their lives like? What did they think of God? What did they love and hope for?
I guess we'll never know. And one day I will 'go to the majority'. And people like Simon Schama (and myself) will write essays about me as one of the beleagured multitude. They'll try to place me into a group that all sought one clear goal, that fit somewhere. Whether I'm a proletarian wage slave who died working in a grocery store, or one of the many morbidly obese Canadians of the post-modern period who died from heart faillure due to excess, or one of the 'faithful departed' in a liturgy (better than unfaithful departed).
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What kind of an account will I give for my life? I can picture it now: "Hi... I'm (name), I was of the (religion) faith, does that mean I'm in? ....Yes that's correct, mhmm glutton, lustful, etc yep. ... Ya I guess I was a Capitalist? is that bad comrade? ...oh I see...well I only shopped at Walmart because it was so cheap, though I guess that doesn't count... alright ... Ya I only did that with one girlfriend ..." and then the questions get even weirder "... well ya, I preferred Charles I to Oliver Cromwell ...but you do remember what he did to Ireland... oh you saw that on my facebook" It's so unimaginable to think of such an epic ending to such a transitory life.
So little of life is epic, so much of it just the drab everyday. So much isn't about Ideals, but rather endless compromise.
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If I believed in reincarnation, I'd just do whatever the hell I wanted. I know that's kind of against the point, but seriously, it'd be like being invincible. It reminds me of when the Romans had trouble fighting the Germanic tribes because they believed in the immortality of the soul so strongly, they had no fear of death.
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Plato makes a pretty good argument for the immortality of the soul.
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well I guess I'll get ready for work.
