Monday, December 10, 2012

The Times



Thinking of ordering a 2013 calendar, and I'm just wondering -- how did people know they were in the Middle Ages?  And how do we know we're not?  Of course, if the world ends on December 21st, or whenever it's supposed to end this time, that will clear that up, and these will certainly NOT have been the Middle Ages. I'm putting off most of my Christmas shopping, just in case.

It was easy enough, I suppose, to realize if you were in an Ice Age, and the Dark Ages? well, duh . . . nobody ever paid utility bills!  But precisely where you stood BC had to be a tricky calculation. And these people of the Middle Ages must have been far more advanced in their knowledge of the Big Picture than we give them credit for.  I have to double-check that this is a Monday.

None of this, of course, addresses post-modern architecture. The melting time-pieces of Dali.

~ RM

2 comments:

mary wehner said...

Absolutely daunting--this whole idea of where we stand in relation to the rest of history or geography or...

Surrealism in what we see every day and think we know. Much of what we take as real is altered by time.

nice post, Ralph.

Kitchen worktops guy said...

That's a really interesting reminder that the way we look at the world and time and even our own history is so ego-centric: defining periods by their relation to us right now, right here. But is there any other way to do it?