The Total Perspective Vortex

[andygates]

Time is a funny thing: Every so often it gets all H P Lovecraft on a fellow.  Take today: I've been killing time between dry heaves (nearly cleared, yay) by marking hill forts in OSM.  Nerdlisch!  But while I'm ticking and tagging, the sheer demented continuity of occupation here slaps me like a wet wing across the face: some of these sites are Neolithic, which means that for ten thousand years these parts have been occupied by people doing what people do - farming and fornicating and generally grubbing around in this damp, fertile dirt, busy being people.  Ten thousand years. 

It's at times like these I get a Stig Moment* and fancy I can see the campfires and the glow from roundhouses.  On a clear night, you can see forever.

...and that ten thousand years is trivial unto the span of humanity, which is trivial unto the span of life - that thin film of life on a tiny blue dot that is, itself, utterly insignificant on any cosmic scale.



* Stig of the Dump, not The Stig.  Best kids book evar.

Comments

[carldem.livejournal.com]

First up: Yay for Stig of the Dump (and walls made of old bottles)

Also can you image how diffrent it feels/is over this side of wee blue marble where habitation is a mere one thousand years, most of that low population neolithic?
Standing places that no human has ever stood. (Dumping rubbish in places no human has ever looked...)

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Must be like landing on a shiny planet. New World indeed. Must have really bent the heads of the settlers.

I need a bottle wall. Maybe a bottle wall with lights in it.

[ladyjulian.livejournal.com]

It's the only good reason I audax. Getting to the top of the middle of nowhere, looking around and thinking - this is unchanged from the times when Beowulf was a hot new story.

Also: Stig rocks.

[andygates.livejournal.com]

Makes you want to ride around Rome and mutter about all those new-fangled aquaducts, eh?

I need to hit the charity shops and track down a Stig.

[spike150.livejournal.com]

Re your last sentence, always worth a link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M

Carl Sagan, "Pale Blue Dot".