Author: Eric Attica

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Personal Update

The Airborne Toxic Event

Today I learned that scholars think there’s a 5 to 20 percent chance that humanity will have gone extinct by the end of the century.

Now, I’m not huge on end-of-the-world scenarios, but there’s nothing that reminds one of their mortality quite like walking out the door to a grey world and the scent of smoke–not the pleasant smoke of a campfire, but an oddly sweet mixture, difficult to place, somewhere between tree sap and dilapidated shed and with a hint of roasted marshmallow. The towering mountains were completely obscured by the fog, giving an ethereal quality to the scene: we might just as easily have been on an eerily quiet island as in mountain suburbia. The smoke, odor, and wind combined to inhibit the senses and make the neighborhood feel almost like the aftermath of some disaster.

In his last lecture to our class, my biology professor summarized the capabilities of humans with two slides: the 9-11 terror attacks and the bombing of Hiroshima. The photographs elicited a grim, awkward silence from the class. He could have chosen any number of images to represent what Homo sapiens have accomplished in the 300,000 or so years of our existence. Perhaps Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press, or the Sistine Chapel ceiling, or even Adam Young on stage. Instead, it was a reminder of the tremendous destructive potential that humans have developed, greater than anything nature has come up with. That 5 to 20 percent chance of human extinction is overwhelmingly due to human causes, an apocalyptic conglomeration of AI rampage, nuclear warfare, life-destroying nanobots, or some combination of the above.

The cashier-in-training at Chick-Fil-A had started the job to buy a new car after his last one got totaled. A young woman with long black hair was doing her schoolwork intently at the bus stop. The bombing of Hiroshima occurred 76 years ago today, and today, as they do every year, Japan is holding a festival where they pray for peace. Humanity has seen worse, and I envision promise in our future.

In the meantime, it seems that the cause of the smoky incursion is a larger fire being blown in from the West Coast. Utahns who already blame everything on California have reason to rejoice. ∎

Categories
Personal Update

Life Update: Academia, Quotes, Yesterday

I promised heterogeneity when I made this blog, so here’s a historical update, some quotes, and a casual movie review (vague spoilers for a two-year-old film ahead).

One of my favorite touches in the Harry Potter books is when Harry and Ron are complaining about their homework. Never mind that Harry has gotten whisked away from an abusive home and given a new chance at life, never mind that he’s discovered new powers and new friends, the fact remains that doing homework, even wizard homework, is still a chore. It’s beautifully human.

I think that’s the best metaphor for college. It’s a dream to be dedicating so much time to learning about this world’s history and material composition. I’m so privileged to have the opportunity to be here creating more opportunities for my future. I love the freedom of being on campus and exploring this corner of the universe. And yet, it is stressful (in its own lucky way) to stay on top of the constant flow of homework amid lecture, work, commuting, and all life’s other responsibilities. My day has quickly gone from an externally enforced strict routine to complete schedular anarchy to an internally enforced semi-strict routine. In return, here are several nuggets of scholarship that I’ve obtained:

"The point of life is not to have it but to do things with it."
   —Melissa Inouye, Crossings (2019)

“‘Unhappy man,’ said Candide, ‘I too have had some experience of this love, the sovereign of hearts, the soul of our souls; and it never got me anything but a single kiss and twenty kicks in the rear.’” 
   —Voltaire, Candide (1759)

“As a rule, the philosopher is never more of an ass than when he most confidently wishes to play God, when with remarkable assurance, he pronounces on the perfection of the world, wholly convinced that everything moves just so, in a nice, straight line, that every succeeding generation reaches perfection in a completely linear progression, according to his ideals of virtue and happiness. It so happens that he is always the ratio ultima, the last, the highest, link in the chain of being, the very culmination of it all. ‘Just see to what enlightenment, virtue and happiness the world has swung! And here, behold, am I at the top of the pendulum, the gilded tongue of the world’s scales!’” 
   —Johann Gottfried von Herder, On Historicism (1774)

"Eating hamburger with a fork? Might as well just be sprinkling for baptism!" 
   —my biology teacher during lecture, 2021 (my Danish friends would be guilty on both counts)

Last Friday, I watched the film Yesterday (2019). In the long tradition of me being a general liker of things, I liked it. It’s about a guy who’s an aspiring musician but isn’t particularly good at writing songs; only a former schoolmate (the love interest) sees value in the music he makes. A plot event causes everyone else in the world to forget who the Beatles were. The main character capitalizes on this, which catapults him to fame and prominence yet damages the one relationship that matters most of all.

It was immensely satisfying to watch Ed Sheeran play a relatively major role in a thinly-veiled critique of the music industry. I was also intrigued by how similar the balance that our John Lennon stand-in walks was to that of the titular character in Dear Evan Hansen: in both works, the main character sustains a lie that has inadvertently blown up to unexpected proportions and enjoys a better life because of it, yet is haunted by that unavoidable specter called truth.

The essential difference is the role of the main character’s romantic relationship: in Dear Evan Hansen, the relationship is merely an appendage of the world created by the lie; in the lighter Yesterday, it’s the thread that tugs him back to the real one. Both characters are trying to do the right thing in an out-of-control situation, but while Evan’s lie self-destructs when it reaches its agonizing breaking point, the more idealized Yesterday gives Jack the motive to face the problems he created on his own terms, enabling the film to comfortably win a rom-com ending even as it flirts with the conflict between reality and desire. The moral is simple, yet delivered beautifully at a crucial point in the story: “You want a good life? It’s not complicated. Tell the girl you love that you love her. And tell the truth to everyone whenever you can.”

That’s clearer wisdom than you’ll find in any university library. ∎

Categories
Personal Update

No New Tale to Tell

What do eighteenth-century Russian tsars and Brigham Young University have in common? Presenting: the world’s very first beard card (above).

In 1698, Tsar Peter “the Great” launched a series of modernizing reforms, realizing that if Russia were to compete with Western European powers, they needed to cast off every custom that would prevent them from fitting in with their imperial neighbors–down to their old-fashioned facial hair. The beard ban was born. Nobles who wanted to keep their beards could purchase this token as a free pass to bear their hair in public without being forcibly shaved. The inscription on the front says “money taken”; the back features a Russian coat of arms and the year (the token had to be renewed annually–and heaven forbid losing weeks of delicate trimming if you were to forget to renew your expired beard token)!

Though the two eras’ beard restrictions differ in that Russia’s were a progressive step toward modern sensibilities in their own century–met with ire from the paying traditional nobles–while Brigham Young University’s were a conservative response to the aesthetic of anti-establishment 60s and 70s counterculture (and beard cards are granted for health, theatrical, or religious reasons, not to paying customers), the fact that today you can hold in your hands a beard pass with the same practical effect as old Peter the Great’s is a testament that nothing in history seems to be truly new. The great periods of development in history are called “Renaissance” (rebirth), or “Reformation”, or “Restoration”–all attempts to get back to some veiled golden age of the past.

This is why I enjoy old literature. It’s a special connection when something so old still resonates in today’s cultures, as if the author and I both know that we’re tapping into what it means to be human, independent of place or time. When Shakespeare’s Henry IV asks himself why he can’t sleep on his comfortable mattress with all of the thoughts weighing on his head, I know that exact feeling, four hundred years later! (I’d like to see a quiz show where contestants have to determine what era a quote is from. “You have power over your mind, not outside events. There is strength in knowing that.” Advice from a psychology book about maintaining an “internal locus of control”, or ancient Roman philosopher? “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all; all go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.” Twentieth-century absurdism, or the Old Testament? Two points to the ancients.)

That last Old Testament quote is drawn from the book of Ecclesiastes, which is keenly aware of this idea that nothing in history is truly new. In ironic fashion, the 80s song “No New Tale to Tell” simply recapitulates Ecclesiastes and seems to add a few stanzas of its own:

All the rivers run into the sea
  Yet the sea is not full
Unto the place from whence the rivers come
  Thither they return again
The thing that hath been
   It is that which shall be
And that which is done
   Is that which shall be done
And there is no new thing
   Under the sun 
                    (Eccl. 1:7, 9)

You cannot go against nature
   Because when you do
Go against nature
   It's part of nature too
Our little lives get complicated
   It's a simple thing
Simple as a flower
   And that's a complicated thing
No new tale to tell
   No new tale to tell
                    (Love and Rockets)

We can learn a lot from those who came before. After all, they lived our very same lives–just in a different place and a different time.