The tweeting historian comparison of Bizantium and tenoctitlan.
The story starts when a teacher, who grew up in postwar East Germany-behind the Iron Curtain-falls into a coma, just to wake up to a newly reunified Germany. Because the shock would be potentially lethal, said the doctors, she is tricked by her son into believing that everything remains the same.
The focus is nostalgically placed on the individual worldview that was being deleted,
what would replace it? And would she be ready for it? What would be her
place in this new world? And why? What about what she believed in, what
she learnt, what she taught?. Why?.
That was the plot of the movie Goodbye Lenin.
In the pivotal scene, the teacher wakes up early and taking advantage of his son’s heavy sleep, ventures by herself to the outside world, untutored, unguarded. And what she sees is nothing but totally a new world, and strikingly, a flying Lenin, crossing the streets and saluting her while is being removed from the city as the past is being wiped out in each of the aspects that formed her life.
Ends of the world like this, hisotry books tell us, had come before in many sizes and shapes, from the conquest of the New World to the Fall of Rome and Bizantium.
Ends of the world like this, hisotry books tell us, had come before in many sizes and shapes, from the conquest of the New World to the Fall of Rome and Bizantium.
Storytellers are idolized in some circles and dismissed in others, many times seen merely as entertainers and time-killer performers in the village, as sellers, as trickers, but this idea risks to omit the fact that stories make us; that narratives are important, how we imagine the order of the world is important, how we place ourselves in the world is important, the stories we tell to us are important.
We know this for certain, alas, but the tangible sense of this escapes from us in the contemporary live, specially in the last fifty years for most regions of the world, submerged in the numbness of the routine, of a myriad of mechanical acts and an implicit notion of thing being the way they are.
Change is paradoxically and certainly, permanent, but in the short span of a human’s life there are certain temporary truths that are needed to be assumed as stable, and the ones we growth with are now in flux.
We know this for certain, alas, but the tangible sense of this escapes from us in the contemporary live, specially in the last fifty years for most regions of the world, submerged in the numbness of the routine, of a myriad of mechanical acts and an implicit notion of thing being the way they are.
Change is paradoxically and certainly, permanent, but in the short span of a human’s life there are certain temporary truths that are needed to be assumed as stable, and the ones we growth with are now in flux.
Until now. Now that we can’t hug each other, see our loved ones depart, we can't touch them, or gather, show our smiles and sing our songs with the unvalued freedom we did before, now that we feel stranded from our usual selves and crucially, our usual stories.
But in the same sense that the discovery of reality can be shocking, in the same sense thus reality will bring the duty to build the new world to this generation, and to imagine, to create, distort and correct, erratically, the new ways of the future, the touch-less reality of the feelings, the love, the hatred, the melancholy and the utter joy of being human for the upcoming decades, as
They will carry our memory through the age of the great reset, to whatever is at the other side of these times.
But in the same sense that the discovery of reality can be shocking, in the same sense thus reality will bring the duty to build the new world to this generation, and to imagine, to create, distort and correct, erratically, the new ways of the future, the touch-less reality of the feelings, the love, the hatred, the melancholy and the utter joy of being human for the upcoming decades, as
They will carry our memory through the age of the great reset, to whatever is at the other side of these times.
What is beyond postmodernism? Or is postmodernism still at its dawn?
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