Autistic About Calendars
do you like calendars
i’m rather autistic about calendars. they’re an urgent special interst of mine.
if time weren’t real and someone tried to describe to me hat it was, I’d think they were trying to to scare me with a ghost story, and that they were succeding.
The Dispossesed is about the imposibility of Time and how we must account for its oblivious perstistent evidence.
its a really raw book about someone abandoned by a parent and isolated by teachers who grows up as an anarchist among anarchists on the Moon, and his decision to go planetside where the world is still profiteristic.
[spoilers for The Dispossesed]
some of you wouldn’t like The Dispossesed, but you’d like some of the worldbuilding.
instead of weeks and months they use Decads, a period of 10 days.
I’m also learning just now that the Dispossesed is a response to The Demons, Dostoevsky, a book i just so happen to have stared reading as I was finishing The Dispossesed. other English translations of of The Demons title it, “The Possessed.”
which makes me exited to continue reading The Demons.
I like the phonetic similarity between Decad (I listened to the audiobook and I thought it was “Decat”) and Decade.
I’m currently 1021 Decads old.
102 Cencads.
10 Milcads.
consider a society set on a generation ship, for example, or on a planet waiting for the ship to arrive. the voyage will take, say, 2000 years. a person, if they live to be a hundred, can hope to span 5% of the journey. and if you’re on the space ship, years might not be a very meaningful fraction to manage time by.
what does February 29th mean to someone ten lifetimes from Earth?
a person might be said to become an adult when they’re “one percent old.”a term of office might last half a percent, or a quarter.
then again, if there’s an engineering malfunction or they are thrown off course, they might loose 11 or 12 percent to the haughty dictates of space and time, and everyone would immidiately understand that another two or three lifetimes have been added between themselves and their successors, those grandchildren many times great, who will finally make planetfall.
decades are weighty though, so for tracking a child’s growth or discussing the proximate past and futurew, parts per mill, thousandths of the voyage, might be in order.
or if we stretch out the voyage to just under 2740 years, one wake/sleep cycle could be defined as 1 part of the sojurn in a million.
such is the length of time now between myself and when Romulus ended his rule of Rome.
in Conspirata, by Robert Harris, the generals and politicians are constantly urging their armies and juries to resolve on this or that so that their names might be known “in a thousand years.”
Conspirata is a biography written from the point of view of Tyro, a secretary, concerning the life of the man to whom he is enslaved, Marcus Tulius Cicero.
Tyro was a historical person who really wrote up such a biography—we have refrences to it, quotes from it—but the original text has been lost for centuries. In Robert Harris’ reconstruction, at time of writing I have just reached the point where Tyro describes nursing his friend and colleague Socithius, another secretary and slave of Cicero, whom Tyro tutored, and whom is dying in Tyro’s arms. after seeing oblivious in Socithius’ eyes, Tyro redoubles his resolves “to write down all of the history I was witnessing, so that my life might at least have this small purpose.”
reading this from a remove of 2084 years, i cannot help but feel the millenia grow ominous, and history seems to me so much dry lightning over a land so thirsty for rain.
00:00:00, on the transformation of the Feast of Djinn to the Feast of Snakes
🏮🧞 —> ☿⚕️
Day 10217