Three Fun Things for November 25, 2024

Pompeii, the Czech Republic, and the Metaverse (circa 1992).

1. Questioning Old Assumptions

I learned about Pompeii in Latin class and promptly forgot the details. Historical data points—what happened and how we know it—were replaced with vague impressions: An ominous rumbling, mouthfuls of ash, then sudden death.

Although I don’t remember much of what I learned, I’m sure it colored by modern assumptions: Historians tend to make up stories to fill in gaps in the record, and the stories they told about Pompeii imposed modern beliefs onto people who died in the first century A.D. (The famous “bodies” are modern casts made by pouring plaster into the cavities made by the bodies and preserved under layers of sediment). Two women, locked in an embrace and dubbed “the Maidens,” were sisters, or perhaps a mother and her daughter, or lesbian lovers sharing a final moment together. A small but tight-knit family, dubbed the Family of the Golden Bracelet, stayed together to the end, the mother clutching her son in her lap.

Unsurprisingly, many of these dearly held assumptions are turning out to be wrong. Earlier this month, the New York Times and other news outlets reported on new DNA evidence showing that “the identities and relationships of the deceased do not match the longstanding assumptions, which had largely been based on physical appearance, the positioning of the casts and romantic notions promoted by literature and Hollywood films.” Those two “maidens,” for example, include at least one man, and mother and child are a man and a boy who are not genetically related. The “pregnant” woman probably wasn’t pregnant—bunched-up clothes may account for the bulge in the cast—and may not have been a woman.

I’m a fan of debunkings (no, that green powder isn’t a substitute for a healthy diet) and I take comfort in the fact that as much as we may learn about the past, some things will always be inaccessible. This story has both things—a triumph of science and reminder that we should be humble instead of making assumptions based on our own limited imagination.

2. Filling In Gaps

Can I recommend Snow Crash, the 1992 novel by Neal Stephenson that basically predicted our entire present tense reality (and probably some of our future)? My guess is probably not—I’m halfway through and it seems like I left the most interesting stuff behind in the Metaverse—but I am extremely excited, on a personal level, to fill in this gap in my cultural awareness that has persisted for so long. It’s been really fun to experience, in real time, that “holy shit” feeling others have described having while reading this book: Wow, he really did invent everything, from the modern Internet to Google Maps (and Earth) to the experience of being terminally online in 2024. (Yes, yes, I know. Neuromancer is next on my list.) I’m also enjoying a weird feeling of nostalgia for the time when the book was written, when Walmart was just starting its march across middle America, Rush Limbaugh and the 700 Club were the monoculture’s loudest demagogues, and the two major parties (represented by Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush) seemed like two sides of the same corporatist coin.

3. Re-Reading With New Context

Almost a decade ago, I decided on a whim to read a book about the region now known as the Czech Republic and Slovakia, called Czechoslovakia: The State that Failed, by Mary Heimann. The book argues that the Czechoslovakian state was never really the exceptional central European democracy that outsiders, including the millions of Americans who visit Prague each year, tend to believe it was, and that it was doomed to fail from the beginning, due largely to nationalism and a sense of victimhood among Czechs that led them to persecute minority groups and neglect Slovakian needs and demands. I drove through Czech Republic recently (Brno was a highlight), and the experience—particularly the way Jews are treated like mythical creatures in Prague’s ubiquitous tourist shops—inspired me to put this book back on my reading list.