There’s an image that’s been going through my head a lot lately. I wanted to share it with you.
It could be a traveler, huddled in a cave, waiting out a deadly windstorm. She has a small fire, and a small pile of fuel for it, but her means of making fire were lost in some previous misadventure. So she keeps the fire small, feeding it one twig at a time. Even though she’s terribly cold. Because if the windstorm ends before the fire dies, she can gather more fuel, and bring fire with her on the rest of the journey.
It could be a family of farmers, going hungry in the winter – carefully guarding the seed corn. They’re not sure if winter will end. Maybe this is before astronomy. Or maybe it’s a nuclear winter, and they’re guarding one of the big seed vaults. Either way, if a growing season comes again, they are determined to have something to plant.
It could be a legal scholar, diligently hand-copying old precedents onto fresh parchment, though his own clothes are ragged. His people are occupied and cannot run their own courts, but if they ever see freedom, the law will be ready for them.
It could be a colony of scholars, dropped on the most backwater planet in the galaxy, abandoning their careers to write an encyclopedia that will survive the coming chaos. They’ve been promised that there will be a renaissance, but they don’t understand the math and the person who promised them didn’t seem entirely trustworthy. For example, he didn’t tell them they were the encyclopedia.
OK, that last one’s less of an image and more of a novel most of you have already read.
Sometimes when I look at the way the world at large treats truth, I feel like I’m sheltering in a cave from a deadly windstorm. I suspect a lot of you do as well. I don’t know how well that feeling corresponds to reality. I tried to do a proper analysis, and it turns out I’m not actually a psycho-historian. Or even really a historian.
And that’s how I come back to this image. Keeping the truth-seeking skillset and culture alive – sheltering that spark so it can kindle something bigger if the storm passes – that in itself is a worthy endeavor.
Of course, we strive to do more. Sometimes we succeed.
This isn’t a conclusion. It’s a tool for keeping in your mental toolbox. An image.
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