History of Things, George Kubler

“Now and in the past, most of the time the majority of people live by borrowed ideas upon traditional accumulations, yet at every moment the fabric is being undone and a new one is woven to replace the old, while from time to time the whole pattern shakes and quivers, settling into new shapes and figures.”

An illustrative analogy runs through my mind: metamorphosis, a range of caterpillars transforming into brilliant butterflies…colors, shapes and sizes. Over150 million years of existence, largely consistent in morphology, but who says butterflies aren’t evolving everyday?

It’s interesting though, what if we never had any structure existing while entering the world? What would we fall back on? With no past- could a space exist just in the present? There would be no concept of time if it does, as time is comprised of the threefold- past, present and future.

New life always survives and grows by using that which came before it- seeds use the soil-water-sunlight, birds use worms-fruits and man began by using nature and then man used his ancestor’s precedent creations- tools, methods of food preparation, survival techniques etc. It is a fact that we wouldn’t be where we are if not for our predecessors- the mistakes, inventions and journeys they followed, allow us to use the present as our starting line.

‘Replacing’ though is a tricky concept, reminding me of the quote- “Sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of- Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses” Jacob Bronowski, English scientist and philosopher. When being replaced things are different yet somehow in someway cognate. Moments take full circles and come back again to form some celestial unknown balance. Like meeting an old close friend after many years, the chemistry would most likely remain the same, but life would have changed so much individually that the friendship is never the same anymore, no matter how identical the relationship is to the past, the meeting in present is all that’s vital.

The passage talks about change. Two kinds of change: one that is of renovation and the other of a complete breaking down to create afresh. But change for most of us is a modified continuity of the past, and that is in the larger sense no change at all. Lets say I am a part of a popular social gang, then I see how ugly it is so I move to another popular social gang- that is no change at all! The ‘change’ is still confined to the same boundaries. History has seen many such external changes, mere reconstructions. As J. Krishnamurti idealistically states, change cannot come out of influence, it cannot be induced, it can take place only outside the field of thought, not within it, and the mind can leave the field only when it sees the confines. Only this sort of change could shake historic patterns that need shedding, allowing us to settle into fresh original figures.