Twilight always affects me in an odd way. There is a feeling of warmth in the fading light, countered by a twinge of dread as the darkness begins to dominate. It's not just living in the city that does it. I think I have always felt this way at dusk, had this feeling of both peacefulness and anxiety at the same time. When I was a kid, throwing newspapers onto the neighborhood's porches, or when I was older, on my way to a night's music at Thee Coffe House, I had this very same bittersweet emotion, the ending of the day, the long night stretching on out ahead. I've wondered if it wasn't something instinctual, some deeply hidden, long gone from our consciousness, animal feeling, the kind that Cro-Magnon felt as he looked out from his shelter at the disappearing sunlight, or, even earlier, what the sons and daughters of Lucy thought while sitting in the protective lower branches of a tree in Olduvai Gorge.
Is that silly? Thinking that the emotions felt three million years ago are the same as the ones we feel today? Or are they the same. The others- anger,hatred, fear- don't appear to have changed all that much during more recent human history, and thankfully, neither has hope, nor pity, nor love. But did our brains get wired up so early and stay wired the same way ever since? Did the first man-ape to throw a stone at a bird delight in the same way when it fell as I do when, by some wonder combination of luck and windage, a basketball I've thrown actually drops through the hoop? There is another example of colliding emotions, the joy of hitting the basket combined with the complete feeling of surprise that the event has occurred.
It occurs to me as I am writing this that most of our emotions occur in competing doses of opposites. At the other end of envy there is a bit of love, at the distant side of love there is just a bit of disgust and hatred. What an odd brain we all carry around with us.
More on this later, it's all just mush right now.
1 comment:
And further, will the equivalent of us manage (within a 300-year life span with corporate-grown replacement organs, longer life is easy)in 500 years to have the same thoughts? the same musings? the same flinging of a stone across a pond? the same freedom to think, once thought transmission and monitoring by the state is possible?
Just as the past is inscrutable, the future leads us to wonder just as much, IMHO.
Toward the end of Thee Coffe House, I, too, had bittersweet thoughts of how special those times were. After I moved to Austin and dragged my reel recorder back to snag moments as they happened. I wondered if I could enjoy them decades later: I can.
Pax Americana, Joe Nation!
Post a Comment