When we return from some weeks away, we have a great deal of mail, mostly ads for things we don't want. But much of the weight of the stored-up mail is magazines. We don't get all that many different publications but Time and Discover and, to some extent, The New Yorker and Wired, all deal with current events and issues.
Since we have several weeks of Time, I skim through them, a rather pleasant task, in a way. Many of the hottest questions have been answered by the subsequent weeks of events by the time I get to them in a magazine several weeks old. Good or bad, I often know that the tsunami has subsided, the market has somewhat stabilized or whatever the worry that week was.
It is rather comforting to read the news as history instead of as worries and scares. The April issue of Atlantic Monthly just sailed into my Kindle and as usual the cover article is memorable. It is about the current state of the media and changes that have taken place since the 80's and are continuing. Recent statements by politicians and others emphasize the value of the media in keeping citizens abreast of what is happening from multiple viewpoints.
I just read a statement by an Egyptian who appeared to be worried about the divisiveness and lack of coherence between the multiple political parties that are emerging in that country. I can sympathize with that idea but I know that we need multiple viewpoints and will have them if people are free to express themselves. Even between two people I know very well and who have lived together, we just about always have multiple viewpoints.
The media article includes a statement by president Obama in response to a student question asked after a speech at a university. The question was what surprised the president about the job of being president. He said he had difficulty knowing where to begin but that one aspect was how hard it was to keep himself and his teams on the task of the longer view. He said that he found that that the news in Washington was always about what was happening this minute.
One of the joys of reading recent but not current news magazines is that it is fairly easy to see a little bit of how things turned out. For instance, I know which film was voted Best Picture now. (The King's Speech, and it is indeed wonderful.)
I didn't have much of a feeling for the subject of history as a high school or college student. But like many others before me, I have steadily developed more interest in the full story as I have aged. I realize now that things don't really turn out, in a final sense. They just continue to unfold on and on.
Trying to take a longer view is actually easier these days. Just yesterday, I downloaded This Fleeting World: A Short History of Humanity by the Australian historian David Christian. That book and that author, as well as others, have begun realizing that the best known facts and perspectives on the entire history of humans, even including some thought of the beginning of the universe and of our planet, make up our full history. Known as "big history" or "deep history", attempts to think about the whole story as currently supported by our best knowledge and theory are being made. No doubt, they will continue to be.
Moving from fearful news to a telling of our story, or parts of it, we move from nervous alert and tension to consideration in a calmer, more balanced mode. One of the many advantages today is that the story can start much earlier. Until I was visiting England at age 34, I had not felt historical age earlier than America. So, hearing that I was passing a stone shelter from 900 AD gave me quite a start. Similarly, since Christian's history discusses humans during the last 250,000 years, I am interested.
