(Howell Creek Radio address for January 24, 2012 -- ) # Sun Will Set Again The ancients, I learned in a lecture, had no standard system of tuning. Wherever you went, the pitches you heard depended on the ears and traditions of the locals, and on whatever instruments they happened to have and how they were tuned -- tuned to each other, or to some particular old man's ear. The universal standard of having everyone up to the same concert pitch is convenient for the art of music for several reasons, but the other way appeals to my imagination too. But then again, just about everything that smacks of local isolation appeals to my imagination. * * * The freeway stretched long and straight as a railroad track, two lanes in each direction, running next to a cornfield on a sunny afternoon. Cars in the lanes going south could drive fast or slow as they pleased; the lanes going north, however, were full of stopped cars as far as you could see. And in one of the cars was a man who had had a long day, was hopelessly late for everything, and whose eyesight was getting dimmer by the moment, under a glaze of defeat. The stress of rush hour traffic and a wicked pre-dinner fatigue combined, finally, to drain him of the will to bother about anything anymore. Screw it, he thought, I'm just going to pull over and take a nap. He pulled his car over onto the shoulder and got out, slamming the door behind him. He turned his back on the traffic jam, the freeway, and everyone, gloriously aware that people were probably wondering what the heck he was doing and that he didn't care. He walked a good hundred yards into the cornfield and lay down. Sleep came like a steamroller over his willing head. When he woke up, the sun was still out. In a moment of insight rare for someone just awake from a hard sleep, he waited for his head to clear before he started back -- strike off in the wrong direction through a cornfield, he knew, could mean an interminably long walk. The corn, curiously, no longer grew in straight rows as it had before. Somehow he got the direction right and in less than a minute he emerged in view of the freeway. The traffic jam was gone. In fact there was not a car to be seen or heard on the road, which was almost overgrown with weeds. His own car was also gone. It was very warm and very quiet, without even the song of a bird to break the silence. He walked several miles to the next exit, past several run-down gas stations, and finally found a bar. The beer was in a Budweiser bottle, but tasted nothing like Budweiser; in fact, it tasted excellent. He could hardly understand the bartender or the two other young men there, though they were speaking something like English. There was no radio and no music. * * * Why were the Dark Ages called the Dark Ages? You might say it was because people were ignorant about a lot of important things; but people today are ignorant about a lot of important things as well. Maybe it is more likely it was dark because everyone was suddenly more isolated. Think of it like this: Your state was once part of a world empire; now the empire is disintegrated and your state is on its own. You used to live in the city; now you live in the country without a car. You had internet and a radio and a cell phone; now you have to walk to town for news. That is darkness of the Dark Age kind of darkness. What remains to be seen is whether, in these last terminal stages of the Enlightenment, we have turned the lights up too bright, so to speak; whether, perhaps, a new Dark Age might not be good for us. When the power goes out and you have no choice but to get out the candles and play cards, the whole time you wish the power would just come on again already; but when the power does come back on, there's this instant where you are aware that for a little while there in that close, dark room you all had something local, human, and special, and you have lost it. A new dark age -- even a short one -- would be a good deal more serious than that. If it doesn't appeal to you then I don't blame you; don't think about it too much. But it may be that you were born for such a time as this, when the empire is disintegrated, and the power goes out. * * * From _Silas Marner_: > In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses—and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak -- there might be seen in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. The shepherd's dog barked fiercely when one of these alien-looking men appeared on the upland, dark against the early winter sunset; for what dog likes a figure bent under a heavy bag? -- and these pale men rarely stirred abroad without that mysterious burden. The shepherd himself, though he had good reason to believe that the bag held nothing but flaxen thread, or else the long rolls of strong linen spun from that thread, was not quite sure that this trade of weaving, indispensable though it was, could be carried on entirely without the help of the Evil One. In that far-off time superstition clung easily round every person or thing that was at all unwonted, or even intermittent and occasional merely, like the visits of the pedlar or the knife-grinder. No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their origin; and how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother? To the peasants of old times, the world outside their own direct experience was a region of vagueness and mystery: to their untravelled thought a state of wandering was a conception as dim as the winter life of the swallows that came back with the spring; and even a settler, if he came from distant parts, hardly ever ceased to be viewed with a remnant of distrust, which would have prevented any surprise if a long course of inoffensive conduct on his part had ended in the commission of a crime; especially if he had any reputation for knowledge, or showed any skill in handicraft. All cleverness, whether in the rapid use of that difficult instrument the tongue, or in some other art unfamiliar to villagers, was in itself suspicious: honest folk, born and bred in a visible manner, were mostly not overwise or clever—at least, not beyond such a matter as knowing the signs of the weather; and the process by which rapidity and dexterity of any kind were acquired was so wholly hidden, that they partook of the nature of conjuring. In this way it came to pass that those scattered linen-weavers—emigrants from the town into the country—were to the last regarded as aliens by their rustic neighbours, and usually contracted the eccentric habits which belong to a state of loneliness. > > ...And Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices. Not that it was one of those barren parishes lying on the outskirts of civilization—inhabited by meagre sheep and thinly-scattered shepherds: on the contrary, it lay in the rich central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England, and held farms which, speaking from a spiritual point of view, paid highly-desirable tithes. But it was nestled in a snug well-wooded hollow, quite an hour's journey on horseback from any turnpike, where it was never reached by the vibrations of the coach-horn, or of public opinion. It was an important-looking village, with a fine old church and large churchyard in the heart of it, and two or three large brick-and-stone homesteads, with well-walled orchards and ornamental weathercocks, standing close upon the road, and lifting more imposing fronts than the rectory, which peeped from among the trees on the other side of the churchyard:—a village which showed at once the summits of its social life, and told the practised eye that there was no great park and manor-house in the vicinity, but that there were several chiefs in Raveloe who could farm badly quite at their ease, drawing enough money from their bad farming, in those war times, to live in a rollicking fashion, and keep a jolly Christmas, Whitsun, and Easter tide. > >...Even people whose lives have been made various by learning, sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible, nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas—where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories. But even their experience may hardly enable them thoroughly to imagine what was the effect on a simple weaver like Silas Marner, when he left his own country and people and came to settle in Raveloe. Nothing could be more unlike his native town, set within sight of the widespread hillsides, than this low, wooded region, where he felt hidden even from the heavens by the screening trees and hedgerows. There was nothing here, when he rose in the deep morning quiet and looked out on the dewy brambles and rank tufted grass, that seemed to have any relation with that life centring in Lantern Yard, which had once been to him the altar-place of high dispensations. The whitewashed walls; the little pews where well-known figures entered with a subdued rustling, and where first one well-known voice and then another, pitched in a peculiar key of petition, uttered phrases at once occult and familiar, like the amulet worn on the heart; the pulpit where the minister delivered unquestioned doctrine, and swayed to and fro, and handled the book in a long accustomed manner; the very pauses between the couplets of the hymn, as it was given out, and the recurrent swell of voices in song: these things had been the channel of divine influences to Marner—they were the fostering home of his religious emotions—they were Christianity and God's kingdom upon earth. A weaver who finds hard words in his hymn-book knows nothing of abstractions; as the little child knows nothing of parental love, but only knows one face and one lap towards which it stretches its arms for refuge and nurture. > > And what could be more unlike that Lantern Yard world than the world in Raveloe?—orchards looking lazy with neglected plenty; the large church in the wide churchyard, which men gazed at lounging at their own doors in service-time; the purple-faced farmers jogging along the lanes or turning in at the Rainbow; homesteads, where men supped heavily and slept in the light of the evening hearth, and where women seemed to be laying up a stock of linen for the life to come. There were no lips in Raveloe from which a word could fall that would stir Silas Marner's benumbed faith to a sense of pain. In the early ages of the world, we know, it was believed that each territory was inhabited and ruled by its own divinities, so that a man could cross the bordering heights and be out of the reach of his native gods, whose presence was confined to the streams and the groves and the hills among which he had lived from his birth. And poor Silas was vaguely conscious of something not unlike the feeling of primitive men, when they fled thus, in fear or in sullenness, from the face of an unpropitious deity. It seemed to him that the Power he had vainly trusted in among the streets and at the prayer-meetings, was very far away from this land in which he had taken refuge, where men lived in careless abundance, knowing and needing nothing of that trust, which, for him, had been turned to bitterness. The little light he possessed spread its beams so narrowly, that frustrated belief was a curtain broad enough to create for him the blackness of night. * * * Synopsis: ---------------- Why were the Dark Ages called the Dark Ages? You might say it was because people were ignorant about a lot of important things; but people today are ignorant about a lot of important things as well. Maybe it is more likely it was dark because everyone was suddenly more isolated. Music cues are, in order: _Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales_ by Partch, _Virudent Omnes_ by Perotin, and _Farwell My Good -- Forever_ by Tye, from the album [_Early Music_][1] by the Kronos Quartet. [1]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0018AM1AS/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=joelsimprpers-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0018AM1AS