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16 April 1905 (10): “In this world, time is like the flow of water, occasionally displaced by a bit of debris, a passing breeze.”
In this dream, people can be transported from the future to the past (or present depending). The narrator depicts these people in a state of continual anxiety, timidness, and, in effect, exile. However these people are exiled by their own volition. They choose to hide and never speak. They spend there time in avoidance of any possible impression on time they might make, though they should be speak out for their knowledge of the future, the diasters and fortunes yet to come. This arises from the fact the do not want to change the good of the future, inhibiting events necessary for world order from happening. They have lost their personhood because, in their situation, they no longer can behave as humans. They musn’t lie on the wrong piece of grass, swat the wrong mosquito, step on the wrong stone – or God forbid talk to someone, if they do not wish to throw the future into chaos and anarchy. We do not seek them out because we do not know they are there. They arrive unexpceted in a trickle of the water of time. When they arrive they are frightenned and have no one to go to. They enter the past alone, and they become lone for the rest of their future. If we could predict the arrival of these people, or could even find them for their social invisiblity, we would certainly use them for gain. We would make them predict the future, and with their knowledge we would change the future. And so the people lost in the river of time live a life of terror and transparency. They do not want to change the future for the worse. But they do not wish to admit they know the future for the better either, as they would run the risk of being interrogated for corrupt gain. It would be a rough life.
Today, people do not synthesize information in the same fashion as we did the time of Socrates. In the time of the ancient Greek philosophers and the great minds of Ancient Rome, minds were taught to be self-reliant (no manual, no study guide attached), with the exception of some text, primarily used to communicate personal thought and revelation over time and distance. It was sparse, and only for the well educated aka the rich. Today conversely, text is everywhere. We read something every five seconds: an advertisement, a magazine cover, the label of a candy-bar, a text message, a blog post, someone’s quippy t-shirt, another text message, et cetera. Text is so ubiquitous that it is impossible to go one day in the modern world (unless you go Walden on society and live alone in the woods), without reading something.
However, this is not the overriding disparity between reading today and reading 2400 years ago, degree. What’s more significant is the “type of library” we have accumulated in our minds. In the time of Socrates, even the time of Homer, a great mind had dense knowledge of a subject; for instance, the Iliad was not recorded in writing for hundreds of years… it was remembered. Whole books were memorized by scholars. At that time, it was normal. The difference is: today we have limited (as in not verbatim) knowledge of hundreds of written sources, back then they knew ten books by heart. If their mind was a library, they would have one shelf of complete books, along with their personal interpretations of them and the conclusions they arrived at with their knowledge. If a modern day reader’s mind was a library, we would have a whole bookcase of one page summaries of famous literature, contemporary media (blog posts, essays, Youtube, etc), and textbook lessons, along with many, many conclusions we have drawn from them. We have a diverse and cosmopolitan knowledge, but it is limited in depth. Ancient minds had immense understanding, based on thousands of memorized lines and interpretations. They made conclusions we marvel at today, but in a sense, we know more than they do.
Their knowledge is a well. Our knowledge is the top of an ice rink.
