The Blanket of Time

Wow, that was a lot of pictures yesterday. Now it's time for some prose - 1541 words today.

Lunch in Namba

Today I met up with an old Japanese friend of mine who is visiting from Hong Kong. We went to an Italian restaurant in Namba, and the food was good. Several things about the restaurant seemed odd to me, though. Not odd like, "only in Japan", but odd in that they went against my basic internal values and aesthetics.

First, the decor of the place was cold. Very cold and impersonal, like the lobby of a company that makes enterprise middleware or something else equally bland. In my experience, Italian restaurants tend to be dimmer, with more organic-looking decor. Rough-hewn wood with farming implements or Renaissance paintings on the walls with tarnished frames. Maybe some stucco. Not aluminum and plexiglas.

Next, the price was a bit ridiculous. It wasn't really so prohibitive, but I've certainly had food of the same quality for much lower prices elsewhere. I guess the thing that got me was that, on top of the inflated prices, they insisted on charging us for the water at the table. Come on, we're already paying for pizza and pasta... what's up with that?

I can certainly understand charging extra for the value of the real estate, but unless you're going to provide a nice atmosphere, why put up the pretense that this is some sort of unique experience? I went there to be with my friend, and I was paying the cost of the meal for that opportunity. I would have been far more happy to have had the water charge included with the price of the menu set than to be told, "here, you have to pay extra because you're so lucky we are giving you mandatory fancy water." Drop the pretense, please. If you're going to go for pretense, make the place look like an Italian farmhouse or something rather than a fancy corporate bathroom.

On the positive side, the glasses and silverware were excellent. Nice reverberant ring to the water glasses, and the silverware appeared to actually be silver. That was a nice touch that made it feel like a "fancy restaurant".

Water Glasses of Antiquity

At one point I caught myself glancing over at the cabinet where they kept all the fancy water glasses, and I had a cognitive glitch. One of those moments where you get a flash of a whole bunch of ideas at once that aren't really related to what is going on.

It was about a topic I have often been stewing on for the past few years - the differences between life now and life in the past. By the past I don't mean the 1970's, or the 1920's, or the 1880's, but long, long ago... Think pre-Roman, pre-Greek, back to the fertile crescent, the Nile, the Ganges.

I often consider what today's society has in common with these ancient civilizations. The differences are obvious, of course, and I feel like they often give us a false sense of intellectual superiority over people in those days. But what of the similarities?

Let's look back at this restaurant. A fancy restaurant on the top floor of a new shopping center in the largest shopping district in Osaka. What did they have going for them?

- Good food. I'm sure they had excellent food in ancient times. People tend to find a way to put together delicious dishes given whatever kinds of food they have at hand. Except for the English, apparently.

- Fancy silverware. The technology for silversmithing certainly existed in those times. In fact, given that there was no mass-production, I would suspect that a great deal more pride went into fashioning beautiful silverware.

- Fancy glassware. Glass-blowing is also an ancient art.

- A solid customer base. I'm not sure about this. I assume that far fewer people had the free time and ready cash to eat out regularly in the olden days, but I don't really know. When in history or prehistory did the concept of the restaurant first arise? Does anyone know? As far as I can tell, this is the only thing that is likely to have changed significantly with the progress of technology.

Reflections on the Past

Anyway, this mental glitch triggered an avalanche of thought. What other things do we have in common with the past, or in what ways are we superior?

It seems like the main forces that motivate people are sex, money, love, and fear. I guess there are more to the list, like hunger, cold, and the need to pee. Anyway, this is all off the top of my head. If you want a more comprehensive listing that can be backed up by actual evidence or research, ask a humanities person. I develop cold, unfeeling automatons for a living.

These forces have not changed significantly since the dawn of civilization, as far as I know, and thus I suspect the behaviors of people have not changed so much either. Love triangles, broken contracts, oppressive governments, betrayal, lies, trust, deceit, inspiration, introspection, gambling, sales, storytelling, and envy were probably just as relevant to life of an ancient peasant on the banks of the Nile as they are to high school kids in North Carolina today.

Why do we think we're so superior? The things I most enjoy in life today - spending quality time with good friends, maybe with some quality food and drink and some quality conversation - are not direct results of technology. Yes, I have more time to do things like this thanks to the generally raised standard of living we have developed, but very little of it has anything to do with computers or space exploration. Even if you're a tribe of nomads out on the steppe, you can achieve the same goal around a campfire after a hard day of herding whatever it is that lives out on the steppe.

What if we're not so superior, then? Still staring at the wine glasses, my mind made a huge, wet, mental sucking sound as I zoomed out temporally to view all of history in one instant... so many of the things we think are so important become infinitesimally small and inconsequential when you do that.

The Blanket of Time

The lives of mere mortals become little, repetitive stories, all the same elements playing over and over again like patterns in a woven blanket. Problems or decisions that seem enormous on a personal scale to each of those billions of little people, are reduced to little repeats of the same refrains - if only we could all share one great pool of memory, we wouldn't be doomed to repeat these little histories over and over again. Great dynasties and kingdoms become reduced to single threads in the massive blanket of time.

This gave me a deep feeling of insignificance.

What does insignificance mean, though? I'm obviously important to my friends and family, and they to me. But our lives will probably have little or no impact on history, like the other anonymous masses whose lives lie untallied in the depths of time.

Perspective

Maybe it means to relax and chill out... that all the drama of life isn't really so significant. On the other hand, maybe that's a dangerous way to think - to chill out about everything is to live one's life without passion. I think passion is one of the things that defines us as individuals and carries the meaning in life.

I guess it's mostly just about seeing things in perspective. Realizing how much of the blanket your life touches, and being sure your decisions and emotions aren't disproportionate. For example, when you think about the reality of politics throughout history, you realize how meaningless it is to get angry about what you read in the news. It's fine to be informed, and even to take action to try to change things, but there's no point in being angry and decreasing the quality of your own life.

Likewise, it is important to see relationships in perspective. Breakups, for example, are hard, but realizing that billions and billions of people have gone through the same emotions you're going through is comforting in some small way. It takes things out of the "end of the world" status category and puts them into the "things that suck but people deal with and move on" category.

In a way it's nice to feel un-special. Although it's disappointing, it's also a bit comforting to know that I'm seldom breaking new ground with my ideas or experiences. Others have been there before me, and others will come after. My actions don't mean anything in the Grand Scheme of Things. I need only worry about their effects on myself, the people and institutions I love, and the reality of the world around me.

Epilogue

I do apologize for the length again... I would have tried to organize and filter a bit more if I hadn't written this late on a Saturday night. I do actually prefer writing coherent essays over rambling aimlessly. :P The ideas I wrote about tonight are very important to me, though, and it is a bit frustrating when I can't exactly put into words why this is. Perhaps I don't fully understand myself. Anyway, hit me back with any thoughts you have regarding similarities between life today and life in the past!