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From: Turk McGee <>
Subject: [FOLKLORE] Millenia
Date: Sat, 01 Jan 2000 11:28:31 -0500

"As a microscope helps our minds to burrow through alien galleries of
cell membranes, and as a telescope lifts us to far galaxies, another way
of coming out of the anaesthetic is to return, in our imaginations,
through geological time. It is the inhuman age of fossils that knocks
us back on our heels. We pick up a trilobite and the books tell us it
is 500 million years old. But we fail to comprehend such an age, and
there is a yearning pleasure in the attempt. Our brains have evolved to
grasp the time-scales of our own lifetimes. Seconds, minutes, hours,
days and years are easy for us. We can cope with centuries. When we
come to millenia-thousands of years-our spines begin to tingle. Epic
myths of Homer; deeds of the Greek gods Zeus, Apollo and Artemis; of the
Jewish heroes Abraham, Moses and David, and their terrifying god Yahweh;
of the ancient Egyptians and their sun god Ra: these inspire poets and
give us that frisson of immense age. We seem to be peering back through
the eerie mists into the echoing strangeness of antiquity. Yet, on the
time-scale of our trilobite, those vaunted antiquities are hardly
yesterday.
We have an approximate yardstick of time: 4 inches of book thickness
to record the history of one millenium. We place the book of the most
recent past flat on the ground, then stack books of earliest centuries
on top of it.
We now stand beside the pile of books as a living yardstick. If we
want to read about Jesus, say, we must select a volume 20 cm from the
ground or just above the ankle.
A famous archeologist dug up a bronze-age warrior with a beautifully
preserved face mask and exhulted: ' I have gazed upon the face of
Agamemnon.' He was being poetically awed at his penetration of fabled
antiquity. To find Agamemnon in our pile of books, you'd have to stoop
to a level about halfway up your shins.
The taming of fire was climacteric in our history; from it stems most
of technology. How high in our stack of books is the page on which this
epic discovery recorded? The answer is quite a surprise when you recall
that you could comfortably sit down on the pile of books encompassing
the whole of recorded history. Archeological traces suggest that fire
was discovered by our Homo erectus ancestors, though whether they made
fire or just carried it about and used it we don't know. They had fire
by half a million years ago, so to consult the volume in our anology
recording the discovery you'd have to climb up to a level somewhat
higher than the Statue of Liberty.
A dizzying height, especially given that Prometheus, the legendary
bringer of fire, gets his first mention a little below your knee in the
pile of books. To read about Lucy and our Australopithecine ancestors
in Africa, you'd need to climb higher than any building in Chicago. The
biography of the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees would be a
sentence in a book stacked twice as high again.
But we've only just begun our journey back to the trilobite. How
high would the stack of books have to be to accomodate the page where
the life and death of this trilobite, in its shallow Cambrian sea, is
perfunctorily celebrated? The answer is about 56 kilometers, or 35
miles. We aren't used to dealing with heights like this. The summit of
Mount Everest is less than 9 km above sea level. We can get some idea
of the age of the trilobite if we topple the stack through 90 degrees.
Picture a bookshelf three times the length of Manhattan island. To read
your way back to the trilobite, with only one page alloted to each
year, would be more laborious than spelling through all 14 million
volumes in the Library of Congress. But even the trilobite is young
compared with the age of life itself. The first living creatures, the
shared ancestors of the trilobite, of bacteria and of ourselves, have
their ancient chemical lives recorded in volume 1 of our saga. The
entire shelf would stretch from London to the Scottish borders. Or
right across Greece, from the Adriatic to the Aegean."
Richard Dawkins- Unweaving the Rainbow.


The poor are fast forgotten,
They outnumber the living, but where are all their bones?
For every man alive there are a million dead,
Has their dust gone into the earth that it is never seen?
There should be no air to breathe, with it so thick,
No space for wind to blow, nor rain to fall;
Earth should be a cloud of dust, a soil of bones,
With no room even for our skeletons.

Sacheverell Sitwell, 'Agamemnon's Tomb'

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• [FOLKLORE] Millenia by Turk McGee <>