Last night, the power for most of our street was off. To their credit, the folks who keep the juice flowing through the lines are normally pretty consistent about sandbagging their restore-times. This wasn't one of those times: 9:30 pm was extended to the improbably specific 12:17 am. (As it turns out, they were only off by an hour.)
Before I powered down the cellphone to conserve battery life (a.k.a. propitiate the Gadget Deities), I texted a snarky Facebook post to the effect that I was pretending to be Laura Ingalls Wilder by reading a Nook by candlelight. (Not at all surprisingly, folks from The Society for Creative Anachronism were the ones to comment.)
In reality, I rolled old-school--eking out another chapter or so in the dead-tree version of John Keay's India: A History. That was before the commotion from a power-company truck inspired a certain cat to investigate by hopping into the bow window that contained our "reading light"--meaning five taper-candles. (Mercifully, only one of them attempted to topple over during those seconds of panic.) That, in turn, inspired us to just go the heck to bed before His Doodness managed to set the house a-blaze.
But not before a certain connection was forged in made in the snarl of my synapses. The plague of Indian history lies in the fact that those who wrote stuff down weren't at all concerned with giving context to future generations. At least not for, roughly, the first couple millenia or so. Which leaves the poor historian with pottery, language shifts, copper bars, and heavily-redacted religious tracts and fawning pangyrics to chieftain-kings. (Ironically enough, this is more than can be said for India's future landlords--a.k.a. the British. By considerably more centuries, even.)
The upshot of that is that such obsessively linear (and always, always patrilineal as well as divine) geneologies and battles in which the opposing sides are invariably reckoned in neat factors of ten and kingdom boundaries expand rather than fluctuate...and most certainly never, ever, contract.
Which, harking back to the earlier jest--entirely at my own expense rather than Laura Ingalls'--reinforces my wondering at how generations to gloss over and...errrrrrr...dare we say?..."tidy up" the narrative now central to present geekdom's weltanschauung. To wit: In relative terms, the late 18th century in America is extraordinarily blessed with first-hand documentation.
Despite such abundance of what historians term "primary sources," many--sometimes diametrically opposed--political cults are willing to claim the same Founder as their patron saint. Thus is a slave-owning George Washington co-opted by the self-proclaimed mouthpieces of personal liberty--or by blatant racists who twist quotes about war profiteering into anti-Semitic screeds. Or the author of the Declaration of Independence is judged too complex to fix a pre-packaged narrative of America and is tossed aside in favor of more...(ahem!) amenable...personae.
Cynically, I don't expect any more favorable treatment a few centuries hence, when the explosion of available information is taken for granted. (At least, I hope all the way down to my marrow that it's still taken for granted.) Now, I'll 'fess up to the fact that being the proverbial fly on the wall in an age when academics almost come to fisticuffs over whether Al Gore or Ted Stevens created the inter-tubes in their garage would be downright hilarious. But, then, I'm kinda sick and twisted that way. (It comes with morphing from a Liberal Arts major into a programmer. Undergraduates of 2011, you have been warned: #LFMF and all that...)
Sadly, I think that if I were cryogenically frozen until, say 2100 and then unthawed, I would have a difficult time convincing folks that a Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't actually have to "rough it" with a first-generation eReader.
In fact, I could probablly joke about it having green text on a black background and weighing 20 pounds (what with all the clunky vacuum tubes, don'cha'know) and (horrors!) no 100G network capability, because of course that was Back In the Day(tm) when AOL enticing everyone to sign up for DARPAnet by mailing them stacks of punch-cards. And no one would laugh because, well, that's how people lived back then, riiiiiight???
That the knowledge-hungry Ms. Ingalls would have Snoopy-danced to trade (roughly) eight minutes (pre-tax) of her workday for the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin would never occur to the denizens of the 22nd century. Or--again--so I fervently hope. Because projecting our hopes and fears on History cuts both ways--meaning forward as well as backward.
