The difficulty with reconstructing history is man-hours.
For example, let’s consider the world right now. The interwebz tells me that there are about 7.7 billion people in the world, and 1.3 billion work full-time jobs. Even forgetting that there are competing definitions of full-time work, and not all work can be accounted for, this means that every year, 1.3 billion year’s worth of labor is performed. Schedules worked. Notes scribbled on paper. Lights turned on. Schematics drawn up. Truck deliveries made. Everything, all of it. 1.3 billion years’ worth.
This is why you could spend your whole life traveling and never come close to seeing it all. Not even close. Already, it seems time slips through my hands, as I can count the years since I’ve been to this restaurant or that store, how almost every time I return to my favorite valley, I learn something new. I feel like I got some good value out of my 20s, but that was a whole decade, already gone.
I like to watch urban exploring videos on YouTube, and there are two channels I’ve probably been watching for the past two years. They never run out of places to explore. Never will. I keep cheering them on – that must be an amazing life to live! But even all that, even all that, can’t begin to scope itself to the history of even the past 50 years.
Sometimes we get lucky. Sometimes we take an interest in a region or a town that has a traceable beginning, something whose origins we can plumb and dissect. But it’s like jamming a straw into icecream cake and extracting only a tiny core of the whole.
I’m awed by history at times, and sometimes disappointed by it. After all, it seems so silly to take such a great interest in something you can only hope to piece together conceptually, as your own life flashes by. The food I ate for lunch, the napkin I threw away. Daily, life can seem so boring at times, but the past so fascinating.
Why history, why not something else? Why not the present or the future? Why nostalgia or wondering how life must have been, without thinking about what life is?
I don’t know. It’s a simple joy, really. How thinking you understand the past helps you perceive the present. The entertainment of imagination, or the excitement when you solve the puzzle. When you find a glass flask on one side of a valley, and find a very similar glass flask on the other, and you wonder if a case was shared or the same miner once knew this place much better than you do now.
I love imagining simpler days, if that’s what they truly were, though I can’t be sure. You hope that the people of the past had the fortune to look upon their lives and be thankful and glad, just as you hope you are appreciating your life for what it’s worth.
It’s still a bit of a paradox, to love the past while living in the present, but I find that joy doesn’t always need reason or a solid rationale. To find the old haunts of those long passed, to wonder what they dreamed as they looked to the skies; I find that’s good enough.