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I think it is very, very difficult to comprehend some things. Like the absence of something which has been ubiquitous in your life. The intellectual idea isn'
by otakucode 12y ago
I think it is very, very difficult to comprehend some things. Like the absence of something which has been ubiquitous in your life. The intellectual idea isn't hard to grasp, and you can even deduce other consequences from the idea, but gaining a visceral (for lack of a better word.. maybe intuitive?) understanding is far more difficult. I came to this belief when I was a teenager and had just gotten into watching foreign films. I watched a film called Hour of the Wolf by Ingmar Bergman. I was watching Bergman films because I expected (from pop culture references) them to be crazy, abstract, unpredictable, and impossible to grasp. They're really nothing like that, of course, but I mention it so you'll understand my mindset.
Instead of being treated to lingering shots of cigarettes, portraits of tired old women, and eggs breaking on chickens, I was actually treated with some insight. It was entirely unexpected, and I imagine that it was not even intentional on the part of Bergman (though if it was, bravo to him!), but I had a very profound realization of what life must have been like before the introduction of electric lights. The main character can't sleep, and huddles around the light of a candle - a positively claustrophobic little area. Now, I had been in circumstances of dark before. I was a Boy Scout and had been away from ubiquitous lighting before. But it was always with the knowledge that I could reach for a flashlight or lantern. I never had to consider that without those things, if I were afraid of what might lie in the dark, I would be forced to simply endure it and wait for dawn - hours away!
I am sure that I only tasted an inkling of what the subjective experience of people in that situation is. But that experience sticks with me decades later. It helped me realize that simply 'knowing' something intellectually can still starve one of the full picture. It helped me realize how profoundly different a life can be with only small changes to environment. It also was one of the big things (along with the humor in The Seventh Seal which doubled me over and which I did not expect) that drove me to become an avid fan of film. The supra-lingual things that a skillfully made film can communicate never cease to amaze me.
- agumonkey 12y agoI would love for our societies to give us opportunities to re-live deeply different situations such as this. Once our neighborhood electricity node went down, usually it's just one building cut for 10-20 min, this time we knew it would be longer. Lucky for us we had candles, but even then, my toilets had no place to put a candle on, so I could barely pee while holding that burning thing in one hand. Far less scary than being left in the wild in the dark but still. ps: I ended up picking a book and reading it by candlelight on my desk. I felt sucked into a 17th century reality. Also, the warmth, short decay and liveliness of a flame creates a very special ambiance.
- benologist 12y agoSociety does give us this ability, you just need to pick a destination and go and immerse yourself.
- agumonkey 12y agoWell, you're right, I just wish it was an explicit and wanted thing.
- PakG1 12y agoOut of curiosity (unless it wasn't a western-style toilet), why didn't you just sit on the toilet to pee? When I get out of bed because of a need to pee, and I don't want to turn on the lights because of how it could affect my drowsiness, and thereby my ability to immediately fall back asleep, this is what I do.
- agumonkey 12y agoCan't tell, makes sense reading it, but while holding the candle I got stuck thinking without electricity I can't even pee.
- Retric 12y agoSome people have extremely poor night vision, but for most people a single candle in a small to mid sized room provides plenty of light to get around. With some effort you can even read by a single candle. Further, on a clear night you can probably walk around with just starlight. So, generally night time was less dark than you might think. Though, in comparison city's often have enough light pollution that it never really get's 'dark'.
- bane 12y agoIt's the difference, as Heinlein wrote about, being 'knowing' and 'groking'. There's an actionable quality to groking that doesn't exist with knowing.
- tacon 12y agoOr the old Japanese koan that goes something like: "To know and not to have done is not yet to know."
- Ollinson 12y agoYou might be interested in the works of Marshall McLuhan, specifically The Medium is the Message. >McLuhan understood "medium" in a broad sense. He identified the light bulb as a clear demonstration of the concept of “the medium is the message”. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence."[6]
- ekianjo 12y ago> It helped me realize that simply 'knowing' something intellectually can still starve one of the full picture Exactly, but this is a common issue for many things. Most historical movies/books are completely wrong about what they want to portray because they cannot grasp the reality of "being there" at the time they take place - merely putting 21st century actors in older clothes on stage but missing how every single everyday life detail was actually different and how it should influence their perception of the reality around them.
- dragonwriter 12y ago> Most historical movies/books are completely wrong about what they want to portray I think that's wrong: I think quite a lot are exactly right about what they want to portray; which is a particular vision emerging from the creators perception of the subject matter that speaks to the present audience.