THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 133 - TIME

I gained a very different view of time & history when I read Larry Gonick’s Cartoon Guide to History. History seemed like a bunch of unconnected scenes up until that point. This was probably a factor of having learned history in school & the disjointed sense of things that those 45 minute long classes would lend to things, also I wasn’t paying much attention in school, too busy drawing. These books really connected the dots for me & I gained an understanding of history as a story in a way that I hadn’t up until then. Aside from understanding history as a narrative, I also came away with an understanding that human history is not very long & that our lives are short as well, especially when you contrast with biological history or even more so when you contrast with geological time. Human memory is even shorter than human life, & these days it has gotten even more profoundly short. I’ve worked so hard on curbing things like resentment that I don’t hold grudges anymore, these slights are like water off my back. So, when a lot of politics are based off of grudges I have a hard time keeping those in mind. The other thing that really got me in terms of developing a lengthier view of history is that I’m able to look at history beyond the human-life centric narratives that have been developed in the last hundred years & look at the human story in terms of thousands of years. This way of thinking alienates me from most people who think in terms of the last few years, decades if we’re lucky, centuries are unheard of. One of the big cultural selling points in this attention economy is that everything is the ultimate battle between good & evil or the last thing ever. I was tired of this trope when it arose, having been raised in the 80s with the spectres of nuclear war, AIDs & the hole in the ozone layer lending a sense of urgency to the time & eventually coming to the realization that these were just puzzles that were being sold as end of the world scenarios by news stations that used this urgency to gain viewers & sell ads, or in the case of public broadcasting, gain pledges. When CNN really picked up in the late 80s & cemented itself with the first Gulf War in 1990 - the 24 hour news cycle was the new standard. This continuous news cycle has shrunk & multiplied & now occupies everyone’s phone, & because there isn’t enough actual news to keep people’s attention, there are commentaries & commentaries on commentaries, providing even more of an echo to the echo chamber. Even with these pieces there is the attraction to comment on current events because that’s what people want - even though I’m thinking about if this writing will be relevant in a decade.

X SEAN

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