John

According to popular belief, people began to collect in a rudimentary society in the north of Mesopotamia some ten or twelve thousand years ago. Using thirty years as a generation, that is 330 to 400 generations ago. Sitting here in my room, I can think back five generations in my family. A skilled genealogist might get me 1/30th of the distance back. And I can conceive of how most of those forebears lived. From the work of archaeologists and from accounts like those in the Bible, I have some sense of daily life at least as far back as the time of the pharaohs, which is more than 1/3rd of the way. 265 generations ago, Jerico was a walled city of 3,000 souls. 265 is a large number, but not in the way that six-billion is a large number-not inscrutably large. Within that 10-12 thousand years of civilization, of course, time is not uniform. The world that we relate to dates back perhaps to the Renaissance. The world as we really know it dates back to the Industrial Revolution. The world that we actually feel comfortable in dates back to perhaps 1945. It was not until after WWII, for example, that plastics came into widespread use. In other words, our reassuring sense of a timeless future, which is drawn from that apparently bottomless well of the past, is a delusion; we live in the shadow of a number, and that makes us somewhat near-sighted.