[QUOTE=MaximLaHaxim;50700773]The fact that, while technology is progressing, society is slowly regressing.[/QUOTE]
[media]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRguZr0xCOc[/media]
[QUOTE=EuSKalduna;50690138]Hirohito died in 89, emperor of japan all the way through.
It just didn't occur to me that he wasn't trialed and even executed.[/QUOTE]
Commissioners and Administrators thought that if the Americans had executed the Emperor, an important symbol to the Japanese people, it would have made the occupational period very difficult for the Americans.
That being said, Hirohito definitely knew and perhaps even participated in the direction of Japanese atrocities in the WWII.
[QUOTE=Pilotguy97;50690246]The brain itself.
Everything you or I have ever done, ever felt or ever believed have been because of nothing more than chemical reactions and electrical impulses responding to the outside world.[/QUOTE]
In relation to that a few years ago I was trying to locate me, like the center of my mind, the part of me that I consider me and as hard as I tried I couldn't. I realized that my decisions came from somewhere else and I only assumed they were mine. I tried to figure out who generated my thoughts but that only created more thoughts as if from nowhere, yet I assumed they were my thoughts, and then I realized everything I assumed to be me was fed from something else including the observational aspects of my mind but even that was because it was being fed info from every other aspect of what I considered me. At that moment I realized that "I" was nothing more than an illusion.
The story of Beowulf. Not the story itself, but how it survived to the modern day. It was written between 900-1100 CE, and there was only one copy of it ever written down until hundreds of years later. That one singular copy survived for about five hundred years until it was partially burned in a fire. To this day, even modern transcripts of it have a big chunk of the story missing because that's the part of the original manuscript that got burned off and was never recovered. Then, about three hundred years later, in the early 1900's, it was only really regarded as a historical artifact rather than as a literary piece in and of itself. That is, until J.R.R. Fucking Tolkien came along, read the thing, and decided he was going to write an essay on the piece arguing why it should be admired as a piece of literature rather than just a historical artifact, thrusting it into the public and academic eye.
It blows my mind that a single copy of an epic poem can survive for over a thousand years, and that pretty much the only reason we read it in high school today is because of a man who achieved success by writing about elves. Not to mention the fact that Tolkien based a lot of his Middle-Earth lore around Beowulf and other celtic/ old English stories like it.
the fact that space has a wall
[QUOTE=Schmaaa;50707126]The story of Beowulf. Not the story itself, but how it survived to the modern day. It was written between 900-1100 CE, and there was only one copy of it ever written down until hundreds of years later. That one singular copy survived for about five hundred years until it was partially burned in a fire. To this day, even modern transcripts of it have a big chunk of the story missing because that's the part of the original manuscript that got burned off and was never recovered. Then, about three hundred years later, in the early 1900's, it was only really regarded as a historical artifact rather than as a literary piece in and of itself. That is, until J.R.R. Fucking Tolkien came along, read the thing, and decided he was going to write an essay on the piece arguing why it should be admired as a piece of literature rather than just a historical artifact, thrusting it into the public and academic eye.
It blows my mind that a single copy of an epic poem can survive for over a thousand years, and that pretty much the only reason we read it in high school today is because of a man who achieved success by writing about elves. Not to mention the fact that Tolkien based a lot of his Middle-Earth lore around Beowulf and other celtic/ old English stories like it.[/QUOTE]
Epic of Gilgamesh also comes to mind, albeit that's a tad bit more known, but just that fact already is mind-blowing considering how ancient that thing is.
[QUOTE=Schmaaa;50707126]The story of Beowulf. Not the story itself, but how it survived to the modern day. It was written between 900-1100 CE, and there was only one copy of it ever written down until hundreds of years later. That one singular copy survived for about five hundred years until it was partially burned in a fire. To this day, even modern transcripts of it have a big chunk of the story missing because that's the part of the original manuscript that got burned off and was never recovered. Then, about three hundred years later, in the early 1900's, it was only really regarded as a historical artifact rather than as a literary piece in and of itself. That is, until J.R.R. Fucking Tolkien came along, read the thing, and decided he was going to write an essay on the piece arguing why it should be admired as a piece of literature rather than just a historical artifact, thrusting it into the public and academic eye.
It blows my mind that a single copy of an epic poem can survive for over a thousand years, and that pretty much the only reason we read it in high school today is because of a man who achieved success by writing about elves. Not to mention the fact that Tolkien based a lot of his Middle-Earth lore around Beowulf and other celtic/ old English stories like it.[/QUOTE]
I really find it mindblowing that so much old litterature survived for thousands of years. My favourite example is probably Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey, written around 600-800 B.C. That's almost 3000 years ago. Homer also pre-dates historic figures such as Buddha, Confuscius, Archimedes, Plato and Socrates by hundreds of years.
Today if I want to read the Iliad or the Odyssey I simply just download the books from data servers half way across the world in a few seconds and put them on my e-book which has the storage capacity of the great library of Alexandria while also being smaller, lighter and more compact than a single, regular book.
I wish ancient writers and philosophers could come back to life for a day just so they could see how much humanity has progressed when it comes to technology. I can't even imagine how technology will progress within my life time let alone within the next thousand or two thousand years.
Imagine how much litterature has been lost throughout history in the destruction of libraries such as the library of Alexandria and the univeristy of Leuven.
[QUOTE=MrJazzy;50707888]Imagine how much litterature has been lost throughout history in the destruction of libraries such as the library of Alexandria and the univeristy of Leuven.[/QUOTE]
I think the fact that so much litterarture has been lost to history makes us appreciate what we have so much more.
that we can actually share this over the internet
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