Nothing New Under the Sun
- Mike Dickey
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
"Teachers told us
The Romans built this place
They built a wall and a temple on the edge of the
Empire garrison town
They lived and they died
They prayed to their gods
But the stone gods did not make a sound
And their empire crumbled
Till all that was left
Were the stones the workmen found"
-Sting
A cool, gloomy morning in Corning, with rain marching northeast from down towards Johnstown and Latrobe, a few cells of convective activity mixed into the soup, not enough to develop into actual thunderstorms, but something to watch.
KELM to KBGM, Elmira to Binghamton. Late this afternoon I'll be flying that route in the Mighty Columbia, not even twenty minutes in the air, to bring the plane to Doug for its annual inspection. The delta sierra weather isn't a great thing--given the duration of the flight, I'll need to take off with the approach plate already loaded on the tablet, ready to transition immediately from climb-out to flying an instrument approach in the rain into Binghamton. An intense few minutes. At least the ceilings aren't supposed to be particularly low.
Today's interesting read comes via my favorite blog, Lawyers Guns & Money, and diverges from their mostly political topics to excerpt this piece from the London Review of Books.
The discussion centers on the Red Sea Scrolls, which detail the daily life of the work crews who hauled limestone by boat to Giza for the construction of the pyramids. A main character is a supervisor/ship's captain named Merer, whose daily log recounts the stories of his men, their meals and drinking habits and the long-vanished ports where they labored. Absolutely fascinating stuff, hieroglyphics come to life as real people with hopes and burdens who've been dust for over four thousand years.
At the risk of the hackneyed and obvious, it gives one a little perspective, eh? Their climate and surroundings were greener and webbed with waterways, before their own experience of climate change over a hundred generations turned the place into the vast desert I recall when I flew there in 1989. They no doubt had their Trumps, their Musks, their pop stars and muddled priests and kids they'd worry about and miss on long expeditions to chisel limestone and float it to the construction site that occupied their entire generation. What of all those things they cared deeply about, things we cannot touch but for this glimpse the scrolls give us into the quotidian details of their workdays?
Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return.
Back in 1983 I took a course called Chinese Lives at USC, taught by Professor Will, a large, awkward, bald guy with a weakness for short sleeve shirts worn with a tie (ah, the things we remember!). Will was a great prof, engaging and so in love with his subject he made you want to fall in love with it as well. The structure of the course was, as the name suggests, biography, looking at the lives of certain Chinese who lived in one dynasty or the next, and finding insights into the values and the customs of the time through their stories.
The individual whose story stuck with me was Wang Yangming, one of those rarities who combined excelling as a philosopher with a life of action as a general. Sort of a Ming Dynasty version of Marcus Aurelius.
One detail I never forgot was Wang's practice each morning of reminding himself of his own mortality, and of the fleeting nature of the things that preoccupied him, by meditating in front of the coffin, his own coffin, that he ordered installed at his home. To state the obvious, those moments sharing a space with a physical reminder of his mortality helped him to live his life in a way that was paradoxically unburdened, as I recall the story. If this is where you're headed, why would you allow the worries of this moment to consume you?
I suspect Merer would lean over the gunnels of his cargo ship and tell us the same thing from the vantage point of 2600 B.C.
Time to get to work, but perhaps with a little lighter perspective on it all.
Opmerkingen