#NewYears Archives – THE PAGE TURNS

January 13, 2025January 17, 2025

Old Beginnings

Woman Reclining at Desk Next to Typewriter @1900, image from © CORBIS

It’s January. It’s time to take stock of ourselves. Make resolutions. Change habits. Sweep out the old. Set some goals.

This is a New Year, but also a repeat of another year. Our universe moves forward, but circles around at the same time. We follow cycles that are as old the understanding of time itself. There are patterns that repeat, which we can see and use to fuel our hope.

There is always possibility.

Ancient planisphere, i.e. map of the cycle of the heavens, with cuneiform, from africame.

Ancient Cycles

The celebration of a new year likely began as soon as people realized that there was such a thing as a year. One of the first big things people noticed must have been the sun and its movements, noticed that this giant flame that provided light did so in a slightly different way every day. There are 37,000 year old cave paintings that show the sun and the moon, using the cave walls a kind of “paleo-almanac.”

Last night, the moon set in the west, pouring light through my bathroom window when I got up. It does that every so often, doesn’t it?

The earliest civilizations in Mesopotamia–the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians–all had ways of counting time and all celebrated the new year. The Egyptians celebrated the flooding of the Nile, which happened in the middle of our calendar year, so their New Year was near the summer solstice. They called it Wepet Renpet, the “Opening of the Year.” As part of the coming year, they held feasts, exchanged gifts, and honored their gods.

January 14, 2022January 19, 2022

Wasn’t It Only Yesterday?

The now nearly invisible Harry Potter. Photo from Warner Bros.

I recently came across a headline that gave me the frowns. It was a week or so ago, but in the midst of my “why don’t people get their history correct” rant, Part One. So consider this Part Two. The caption was:

Why so much Obama-era pop culture feels so cringe now: How Hamilton, Parks and Recreation, and Harry Potter lost cultural cachet.
Constance Grady, Vox.com

Much of this is a calculated irritant. The headline was recommended by a browser algorithm that is the technological equivalent of supermarket tabloid stands. It’s designed to be a wet fish slap. Obama somehow seems to share in the blame. At least in the supermarket, you can also contemplate the Snickers bars. On the Internet, it’s just you and this headline and the other stories cum ads about the “Last Bed/Pizza-Kit/Migraine Remedy You’ll Every Buy.”

It’s clickbait. It’s written by people whose profession is to tell you what to think and how to live. Those folks in the ancient days were the rule-making priests, then the culture-stamping bosses; now they are self-appointed influencers. (I was going to add barely-known bloggers, but then I’m a barely-known blogger, so never mind).

We all shouldn’t care so much. And yet…so many questions spring to mind.

Who decided Hamilton, Harry Potter, and Parks and Rec are completely out of favor? Who decided these were Popular in the first place? How is Harry Potter even “Obama-era,” when all of the book were published before Obama? I dispute the premise, and I dispute the facts. And it’s worth spending a few minutes on this because we should not stir together opinions about politics, art, and facts as if they are interchangeable. When we do that, it becomes much easier to dismiss videos from January 6th as “that’s your opinion.”

January 4, 2022January 5, 2022

The Past Is Not What It Used to Be

A Greek temporal celestial calculator @ 200 BCE. Photo by Tony Freeth in Scientific American.

This is the time of year when we collectively think about time, about how the page is turning (ha! my website). But we don’t just turn the calendar page–we switch out the calendar. We might perhaps feel the icy fingers of Time brushing the nape of our neck, yet we also imagine the bouncing baby of 2022. Spring must be coming, yes, sometime soon? Better times?

With the new year circling the tarmac on approach, I have had a heightened awareness of time and history. Recent stories have surprised me: a wet fish slap to the brain about How We Remember the Past. I found enough examples to fill two posts. This one will talk about history by the historians, the next about history in recent memory. The Past is not simply a collection of facts.

The Past No More

History textbooks when I was growing up often had misstatements and exaggerations; I’m sure yours did, too. For example, Columbus did not discover America. He had a very good publicist, given that he didn’t even make it to North America, but only landed in the Bahamas, not to mention “discovering” an area already populated. He also brought smallpox and enslavement along with the possibility for ~~exploitation~~ trade. Even so, I can still visualize the cartoon of my childhood where Peabody and Sherman helped Columbus prove that the earth was round. It’s hard to shake simplistic explanations.