A 16th century German ‘oath skull’ (a human skull on which defendants swore their oath in Vehmic courts) engraved with the 'magical’ Roman 'Sator square’, mysterious palindromic word-squares found across the Roman world, comprising the words SATOR, AREPO, TENET, OPERA, ROTAS
The author of the Charlemagne book I’m listening to puts a lot of emphasis on the difference between modern people and medieval people, and how we can never really enter into a medieval mindset. and to a large extent, I think he’s right.
I mean, I think there are at least two levels:
First, there’s “people have always been people”: people have always had petty complaints about shopkeepers, and loved children and siblings, and made toys and left graffiti. Modern apartment-dwellers can understand many things about Romans living in insulae - annoying neighbors, fourth-floor walkups, absentee landlords.
But second, there’s a larger mindset that we can try to understand but never share: medieval people lived in a world that was much less certain than ours, in many ways. Not only practically uncertain - you don’t know if the harvest will fail, so you don’t know if you’ll have enough to eat that winter - but uncertain in that there are so many more unknowns about the world - if the harvest fails, you don’t know why. You can’t predict the weather; you don’t know what causes the weather. That has to affect your decision-making, and the way you live your life, in so many ways I can’t even begin to speculate on.
In the end, I think it’s important to remember both - these are people, with people’s quirks and faults and desires, both large and small – but they’re people in a context, with points of view, and in circumstances that are completely different from ours.
“Composed primarily of Catholic Irish immigrants, the battalion also included Germans, Canadians, English, French, Italians, Poles, Scots, Spaniards, Swiss, and Mexicans, many of whom were also members of the Catholic Church.[2] Disenfranchised Americans were in the ranks, including escaped slaves from the Southern United States.[3] ”
So, Elon Musk is talking about how to colonise Mars, and suggesting that, for those who couldn’t afford the fortune it would normally cost to make a space voyage, loans could be offered… and people could, y’know, just pay them back with labour upon their arrival…
… all at the same time that the viral hit song is a sea shanty about being a worker transported to an inhospitable place to work for a big corporation, which then pays you shit so you can never afford the passage home.
It’s like, sometimes our past speaks to us. And sometimes it jumps up and down, screaming and waving lit sparklers.
This is the generation that came of age during WWI and the 1918 flu pandemic. They witnessed their world collapse in the first war that spread around the globe, and they – in retrospect, optimistically – called it the “war to end all wars”. And that war was a quagmire. The trenches on the Western Front were notoriously awful, unsanitary and cold and wet and teeming with sickness, and bloody battles were fought to gain or lose a few feet of territory, and all because a series of alliances caused one assassination in one unstable area to spiral into a brutal large-scale war fought on the ground by people who mostly had no personal stake in the outcomes and gained nothing from winning.
On some of the worst-hit battlefields, the land is still too toxic for plant growth.
And on the heels of this horrific war, a pandemic struck. It’s often referred to as “the Spanish flu” because Spain was neutral in the war, and so was the first country to admit that their people were dropping like flies. By the time the warring countries were willing to face the disease, it was far too late to contain it.
Anywhere from 50 to 100 million people worldwide would die from it. 675,000 were in the US.
But once it was finally contained – anywhere from a year to a year and a half later – the 20s had begun, and they began roaring.
Hedonism abounded. Alcohol flowed like water in spite of Prohibition. Music and dance and art fluorished. It was the age of Dadaism, an artistic movement of surrealism, absurdism, and abstraction. Women’s skirts rose and haircuts shortened in a flamboyant rejection of the social norms of the previous decades. It was a time of glitter and glamour and jazz and flash, and (save for the art that was made) it was mostly skin deep.
Everyone stumbled out of the war and pandemic desperate to forget the horrific things they’d seen and done and all that they’d lost, and lost for nothing.
Reality seemed so pointless. It’s not a coincidence that the two codifiers of the fantasy genre – J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis – both fought in WWI. In fact, they were school friends before the war, and were the only two of their group to return home. Tolkein wanted to rewrite the history of Europe, while Lewis wanted to rebuild faith in the escape from the world.
(There’s a reason Frodo goes into the West: physically, he returned to the Shire, but mentally, he never came back from Mordor, and he couldn’t live his whole life there. There’s a reason three of the Pevensies can never let go of Narnia: in Narnia, unlike reality, the things they did and fought for and believed in actually mattered, were actually worth the price they paid.)
It’s also no coincidence that many of the famous artists of the time either killed themselves outright or let their vices do them in. The 20s roared both in spite of and because of the despair of the Lost Generation.
It was also the era of the Harlem Renaissance, which came to the feelings of alienation and disillusionment from a different direction: there was a large migration of Black people from the South, many of whom moved to the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Obviously, the sense of alienation wasn’t new to Black people in America, but the cultural shift allowed for them to publicly express it in the arts and literature in ways that hadn’t been open to them before.
There was also horrific – and state-sanctioned – violence perpetrated against Black communities in this time, furthering the anger and despair and sense that society had not only failed them but had never even given them a chance. The term at the time was shell-shock, but now we know it as PTSD, and the vast majority of the people who came of age between 1910 and 1920 suffered from it, from one source or another.
It was an entire generation of trauma, and then the stock market crashed in 1929. Helpless, angry, impotent in the face of all that had seemingly destroyed the world for them, on the verge of utter despair, it was also a generation vulnerable to despotism. In the wake of all this chaos – god, please, someone just take control of all this mess and set it right.
Sometimes the person who took over was decent and played by the rules and at least attempted to do the right thing. Other times, they were self-serving and hateful and committed to subjugating anyone who didn’t fit their mold.
There are a lot of parallels to now, but we have something they didn’t, and that’s the fact that they did it first.
We know what their mistakes and sins were. We have the gift of history to see the whole picture and what worked and what failed. We as a species have walked this road before, and we weren’t any happier or stronger or smarter about it the first time.
I think I want to reiterate that point: the Lost Generation were no stronger or weaker than Millennials and Gen Z are today. Plenty of both have risen up and fought back, and plenty have stumbled and been crushed under the weight. Plenty have been horribly abused by the people who were supposed to lead them, and plenty have done the abusing. Plenty of great art has been made by both, and plenty of it is escapist fantasy or scathing criticism or inspiring optimism or despairing pessimism.
We find humor in much the same things, because when reality is a mess, both the absurd and the self-deprecating become hilarious in comparison. There’s a reason modern audiences don’t find Seinfeld as funny as Gen X does, and many older audiences find modern comedy impenetrable and baffling – they’re different kinds of humor from different realities.
I think my point accumulates into this: in spite of how awful and hopeless and pointless everything feels, we do have a guide. We’ve been through this before, as a culture, and even though all of them are gone now, we have their words and art and memory to help us. We know now what they didn’t then: there is a future.
The path forward is a hard one, and the only thing that makes it easier is human connection. Art – in the most base sense, anything that is an expression of emotion and thought into a medium that allows it to be shared – is the best and most enduring vehicle for that connection, to reach not just loved ones but people a thousand miles or a hundred years away.
So don’t bottle it up. Don’t pretend to be okay when you’re not. Paint it, sculpt it, write it, play it, sing it, scream it, hell, you can even meme it out into the void. Whatever it takes to reach someone else – not just for yourself but for others, both present and future.
Because, to quote the inimitable Terry Pratchett, “in a hundred years we’ll all be dead, but here and now, we are alive.”
“We’re engaged now and setting out on the sea of life together in our little raft.” dude you’re both rich as Midas. you’re setting out together in a yacht, minimum
Increasing amounts of “per my last email” in letters between Husband and Father-In-Law discussing Wife’s income from the family fortune
Husband: “HAVE YOU HAD THE BABY YET I’M SO WORRIED I WADED THROUGH A FLOOD TO GET TO THE POST OFFICE”
Husband: “Get the baby a suit of armor or I’m sure to crush her with hugs when I get home”
Wife: “Teenage Daughter, could you send me my gold lamé turban?”
I sat there staring into space mouthing “what” for like a solid minute
I want to see this hat SO BADLY
Husband: “Son was firing his toy cannon at my office door, so I had to sally forth and valiantly seize the enemy munitions!”
Teenage Daughter: “My friend and I had our mutual admirer guess which of us had made which pudding to win a pair of gloves from one of us.”
Wife quotes Byron NONSTOP
Wife: “Fuck slave-owners and fuck the Missouri Compromise.”
Yes, they were abolitionists
Yes, they actually did treat their servants well and pay them fairly
Husband: “That old widow I rent to is behind with her payments, but don’t evict her because that would be inhumane, especially since it’s winter.”
Husband: “Wife, remember to wear your flannel petticoats to stay warm- and so I can take them off you when I get home.”
Also Husband, not paraphrased: “How close I should lie to you and how hard I should love you if I were there.”
WONDER WHY THEY HAD 11 KIDS
Husband: “On our tenth anniversary, I just wanted to say that you’re as beautiful to me as always and I love you the most that anyone has ever loved anyone else in the history of the world.”
Wife: “Hi yes I also love you the most that anyone has ever loved anyone else in the history of the world.”
Wife: “My handwriting sucks and I’ve burned three attempts at this letter already but HAVE I TOLD YOU ABOUT THIS AWESOME TREE I SAW BESIDE THE ROAD YESTERDAY”
Husband makes so. many. puns. Help.
Wife: “Send two or three pounds of the best chocolate you can find, please.”
Husband: “We have ice cream with dinner every day here- don’t be jealous!”
Husband: “Young Adult Daughter, I wrote a poem about your rejected suitors. Here it is.”
Unfortunately I cannot remember the poem at the moment. But there was a part like, “And as for Frank Lyman/He’ll never be my man.”
Just roasting a bunch of young men with surnames you now see on Boston street signs
Reading about the early history of printing in the 15th century but I keep getting distracted and giggling because the guy who succeeded the famous William Caxton after he introduced the printing press to England was called Wynkyn de Worde. Wynkyn de Worde! And he was a printer/publisher! There seems to be some debate about the name’s origin and he might actually have been John/Johannes/Jan Wynkyn but, still, what a fantastically appropiate name!
“Every historian wants to know what really happened in the past. That means - at a minimum - gaining access to records, the more detailed and accurate, the closer to the actual events, the better. But in our hearts we always want more than we can ever have: we want to read documents that are lost forever; to interview people long dead; to be eyewitness to the great events that changed the course of history. We want that in part because we want to solve mysteries, we do want to know the truth about the past.”
- Byron Hollinshead and Theodore K. Rabb (eds.), I Wish I’d Been There, Book Two.
Five thousand years ago, the Sumerians called the night ngi, the stars mul, and the moon Nanna.
Four thousand years ago, the Akkadians called the night mūšu, the stars kakkabū, and the moon Sîn.
Three thousand years ago, the Hittites called the night išpanza, the stars haštereš, and the moon Arma.
Two and a half thousand years ago, the Greeks called the night nux, the stars astra, and the moon Selênê.
Two thousand years ago, the Romans called the night nox, the stars stellae, and the moon Luna.
Kings and queens and heroes looked up at them. So did travelers coming home, and little children who sneaked out of bed. So did slaves, and mothers and soldiers and old shepherds, and Sappho and Muršili and Enheduanna and Socrates and Hatshepsut and Cyrus and Cicero. In this darkness it didn’t matter who they were, or where they stood. Only that they were human.
Think of that tonight, when you close your window. You are not alone. You share this night sky with centuries of dreamers and stargazers, and people who longed for quiet. Are you anxious? The Hittites were too: they called it pittuliyaš. Does your heart ache? The Greeks felt it too: they called it akhos. Those who look up to the stars for comfort are a family, and you belong to them. Your ancestors have stood under Nanna, Sîn, Arma, Selênê and Luna for five thousand years. Now its light is yours.
