Another precious gem from the book mines -- Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982).
And I'm seeing a clear series of interconnecting patterns, along the lines of the quip (inspired by a thought that is longer and more complex) by Søren Kierkegaard: "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards" (1843). Clever lad, but when shortened to virtually slogan length, not entirely true. We do have some understanding, some inkling, of where life is going, or could go, when (or if) we take time to muse.
But as for All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Kierkegaard makes appearances, as do Gogol, Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky (Berman goes with the Dostoevsky spelling) -- among a gob of other groovy writers, thinkers, dreamers and knowers. In a nod to Bob Dylan and the 1960s, there's a chapter called "The 1970s: Bringing It All Back Home." And throughout this book, everything that might seem eclectic and loosely based is seen holistically, even as constant change often makes people feel as if they (along with the years and decades) are blowin' in the wind.
Technological-communications, town and city planning, transportation, time itself as measured and understood by human beings -- all through the past couple hundred years have brought and have seen and have experienced dramatic change.
Take some examples, and then some water and an aspirin. Ha:
Railroads
Telegraph lines
Engine-powered ships
Electricity
Widespread indoor plumbing
Telephone lines
Airships and aeroplanes, submarines and jets
Automobiles
Radio broadcasting
Air conditioning
Poison gas and rockets, nuclear bombs, napalm
Television
Reliable birth control
Spacecraft and satellite communications
Personal computers, internet
Digital, mobile wireless devices
Pilotless drones and miniaturized robotics
Social Media
3D Printing/Micro-manufacturing
Holographic projections, image cloaking
The known and the unknown
The foreseeable and the unforeseeable
Yeah, Steve Miller has it this way:
Time keeps on slippin,' slippin'
into the future . . .
And don't you know it? That's why, I suppose, it's somewhat comforting to have or develop some kind of feeling of continuity, some grounding, some context, some historical and philosophically glimpsed sense of things.
Today's Rune: The Self.
2 comments:
It would be wonderful to have a full exploration of how the time sense has changed over human history. Guess we'd need a time machine to do it, though.
Hi, Erik!
The phrase "All that is solid melts into air 'Marx and is very well used for a book title philosophical.
Marshall Berman was here in Brazil giving lectures and in his speech, realizes that his attempts to decipher modernity is latent. It said something like: Modernity is able to undo what until then was eternal, a hazardous environment, which paradoxically puts man in turmoil and contradictions, struggles and anxieties.
Very good start to the day ... thinking!
Beijus,
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