Looking to History at a New, Pivotal Time

摘要

England 1066: A foetid fog clung to all the valleys of the human condition. Not ignorance, for that would imply a wilfulness, a complicity on the part of all its inhabitants; it would hint at an unwillingness to shake the surly constraints of human limitation. It was a darkness daily being challenged by the immense courage of individuals who cried their defiance of the clawing, cloying, suffocating mist, and ventured into the unknown. And almost everything was unknown, or but partially known. That which once was known was now lost. It was midway between the gloaming eventide of Rome's Western Empire in the late Fifth Century of the modern era and the dawning in the mid-15th Century of the age of inquiry, debate and learning. But Rome was lost too far into the recesses. It was now but myth, the realities of its learning and power known only from the Imperial civilization's remaining manuscripts in secret chambers of remote monasteries in Ireland, Rome, and mountain or desert wildernesses. The deeper foundations of Roman civilization―the city-states of Hellas, the wisdom of the Great King Darius' Persia and the earlier reasoning of Zarathustra; the soft humanity of Buddha; the majesty of Egypt―lay hidden in a still more rarified stasis. Some of this static memory of history included the surviving documents, some was embodied in the physical remnants-of-remnants, shards of forgotten civilizations awaiting the rediscovery of archaeological interpretation.