Wednesday Literary Perambulations: World History in Quick Bites

This charming little book chronicles the beginnings of man from Pre-history (once again, another work that begins in the cave!) to WWI (frankly, just reading the prehistory chapter and the WWI chapter back to back and skipping the rest of time you have to ask yourself, have we really progressed at all?)   The author, E.H. Gombrich, a Viennese cultural historian who lived mainly in London is most famous for his art history text book, The Story of Art (also worth owning as a reference).  However, his tiny little history summary is a gem – and easily read in bits and bites.  The woodblock illustrations add to the charm.  Available only in German during the 20th century-(Gombrich wrote the original in 1936) – he self-translated the work into English in his later years, working on it until his death, at which point his research assistant took over and brought it to fruition.  It was published in the US in paperback  by Yale University Press posthumously (2008).

It is a perfect bedside book to read “in”  — ours lives on our bathroom reading shelf and teens and adults enjoy browsing through its chapters none of which are more than 11 or 12 pages long.

Why Caves?

Entombment of Jesus, Mosaic, Church of Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

Someone asked me recently: why caves?    Before starting this blog, I spent some significant time reflecting on imagery that would hold up over time and give me ample literary, artistic and philosophical territory to explore.  Caves kept coming up.   Why would the cave as metaphor hold my attention?  Well, for one, caves are the source of endless material in our modern culture. They are after all where most of us think we began.  Caves are depicted as a source of transformation – from the solemn image of the cave as a conduit for Jesus between His descending and ascending to the pop image of the cave as the safe-house for the quick change antics of Bruce Wayne as he transforms from citizen to Batman and back again. 

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Caves are the source of earth-shattering discoveries: from the cryptic paintings of the hunt at Lascaux to the writings that the Gnostic Christians produced during the 1st to 4th Centuries that were found quite recently in a series of Egyptian caves.  Caves are the place of mystics.  They are where bears and other animals go to retreat and hibernate.   Let’s face it, caves are also kind of creepy.  Much as in life, one often cannot see around the twists and turns of the cave – it is a place where you never quite know what you may find next.  Caves serve as a common metaphor for the locality we return to in order to connect with the after-world; all the while seeking strength to tough it out in the current life we’ve got.  Caves inspire and shock – they are a conduit to our deeper selves and our collective past.  As such, caves seem to work quite nicely as the platform for midlife musings.