On May 6, 2009, at 8:34 PM, William Conger wrote:
Anyhow, it's really amazing, how little of anything survives a generation or two. Think of all the stuff from, say, 200 years ago that has vanished. Very few people can point to some hand-me-down that's 200 years old, let alone 50 years, or even less. Almost all new artworks around today will be gone in 50 years, to say nothing of books on crappy paper, cheap discs, obsolete electronics, etc. Our civilization won't be preserved.
Part of that is is not what we remember, but what I call the logarithmic scale of history. We remember many things in great detail from the year just past, and think all of the small things are consequential. But as the one year stretches into five, we remember fewer from each year. And then ten, and twenty, and then our intervals turn into half-centuries or one's lifetime, then into the big demarcations like centuries.
Art (an all) history books cover the Egyptian period, some 3600 years, in as much space as the chapter on Modern Architecture from Louis Sullivan to the Guggenheim museum, some 80 years. That's a 45:1 scale difference!
Part of that dilution of detail is the fact that we (most of us) didn't live back then, in the 1920s or 1880s, and so all we know of that time is what someone told us or what we read and have seen as artifacts. The rest of that stuff is impersonal information to us. As for direct knowledge of what happened before the Civil War or the Revolution of 1848--no one is alive who heard from someone else about those times. The closest direct contact I have is a photograph of my grandmother and my mother as a small child holding a Southern drum that my grandfather recovered as a souvenir from a Civil War battlefield (when he was a boy and somehow or another was attached to a military unit). The rest of that is just book knowledge.
Ah, I see William's second message just arrived. My oldest possessions are some of those photographs, and my sister happens to have inherited a 17th or 18th century French cherry breakfront cabinet, which my parents bought in the 50s. And several of the Waverly novels, published in 1835.
BTW, on another note, scientists who study these things have determined that the oldest tract of surface land on the planet is located in the Negev Desert.
http://www.livescience.com/environment/090505-oldest-earth.html | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady [email protected]
