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Connecting To The Past
Jan. 17th, 2010 02:05 pmJuly 2009
Pompeii - Mary Beard - Profile Books, 2008
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One of the problems with the traditional western philosophy of individualism is that it treats people as if they were metaphorical billiard bills who interact by bouncing off each other. In my view, this is incorrect - a better model of human personality is that we are nodes in a network, each one of us a unique and complex tangle of our interactions with other humans and things in our environment*. One of the ways in which the network manifests is what happens when someone dies. In the billiard ball model, it shouldn't matter - there's simply one less ball to bounce off. But we all know that this isn't true. Bereavement leaves long-lasting and sometimes bizarre effects, as would be expected if the relationship threads connecting us to the dead person were flapping loose and changing who we are.
I mention this because it might explain one of the odder ways in which I remember my mother, which is to watch or read things that I would not otherwise be interested in - like bonnet-buster tv series - because she would have done if she were alive. This book is a case in point. She loved history, but her interest was not in its epic sweep, grand personalities or major battles. What she liked was social history, the colour and texture of everyday life. She made scrap books with pictures culled from magazines, books and photographs which traced the development of furniture or clothing styles down the ages, and her interest in dolls houses (notorious to certain readers of this blog) was chiefly about the imaginative reconstruction of domestic interiors from different historical periods. She never did a Roman scene but this book, with its quirky insights into Roman everyday life as deduced from the findings at Pompeii, would have been absolutely grist to her mill and would, I think, have inspired her to try. And I must say that I enjoyed it too.
( Read more... )
Pompeii - Mary Beard - Profile Books, 2008
* * * * *
One of the problems with the traditional western philosophy of individualism is that it treats people as if they were metaphorical billiard bills who interact by bouncing off each other. In my view, this is incorrect - a better model of human personality is that we are nodes in a network, each one of us a unique and complex tangle of our interactions with other humans and things in our environment*. One of the ways in which the network manifests is what happens when someone dies. In the billiard ball model, it shouldn't matter - there's simply one less ball to bounce off. But we all know that this isn't true. Bereavement leaves long-lasting and sometimes bizarre effects, as would be expected if the relationship threads connecting us to the dead person were flapping loose and changing who we are.
I mention this because it might explain one of the odder ways in which I remember my mother, which is to watch or read things that I would not otherwise be interested in - like bonnet-buster tv series - because she would have done if she were alive. This book is a case in point. She loved history, but her interest was not in its epic sweep, grand personalities or major battles. What she liked was social history, the colour and texture of everyday life. She made scrap books with pictures culled from magazines, books and photographs which traced the development of furniture or clothing styles down the ages, and her interest in dolls houses (notorious to certain readers of this blog) was chiefly about the imaginative reconstruction of domestic interiors from different historical periods. She never did a Roman scene but this book, with its quirky insights into Roman everyday life as deduced from the findings at Pompeii, would have been absolutely grist to her mill and would, I think, have inspired her to try. And I must say that I enjoyed it too.
( Read more... )