I am not restful, and it bothers me. There are a lot of exciting things happening, but at the moment, I am spreading myself too thin. I don’t see being busy as trait worthy of admiration. Focus is far superior, and I am not able to focus as much as I would like to due to time and money constraints. I know this is a transient period, and this fact is going a long way to how I am able to cope with it and rationalize it. I recently finished Mike Duncan’s The History of Rome podcast, and have now moved on to his Revolutions which I find just as enjoyable. cgod have you listened to either? At any rate, I guess I read history more than the average bear. In A Distant Mirror, Barbara Tuchman wrote: I can’t shake the feeling that we might be within what will be later perceived as a period of disaster. It’s not a disaster for us in the here and now, but there is upheaval occurring about us, and I think the output of this century is going to be significantly dissimilar to the input. Don’t get me wrong, Trump and ISIS are not on the list of things that make me feel this way; central bank balance sheets, workforce participation, machine learning, and global warming are on the list. I just added Jim Corbett’s Man Eaters of Kumaon to my reading list.Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times.
I'm now five books into Will Dutton's opus and the point he makes over and over is that even the most deboucherous and licentious city-states of history were largely composed of ordinary people having ordinary lives and enjoying ordinary things. Rulers that kept things peaceful for half a century get a sentence or two; those that destroyed culture in a few brief years get chapters.
I'm just in the first segment, so I haven't experienced that yet. Do you think that THoR had such a thesis? It didn't seem to me that it did, aside from the arch of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire itself. IMO, Duncan started to find his voice about 60% into THoR, when he made the realization that he was starting to just talk about the rise and fall of Emperors, and then broadened the scope and allowed for tangents a bit more. Thus far, I've found Revolutions pretty balanced in that way.
I think Duncan kept improving throughout the podcast, which is pretty normal if you've listened to many history podcasts. But sometime around the middle he definitely found a voice and settled on a way to present the material. Revolutions sounds like the history of a topic more than several disparate and tangentially related histories. It seems like there should be some kind of general lesson to draw out of the study of a dozen revolutions beyond a recounting of the facts. Maybe there will be some kind of conclusion at the end, I hope so. Duncan has spoken before that he has some novel overarching theories of history, I'd be interested to hear them in podcast form. Check out The History of England By David Crowther next time you need a good history podcast. It starts pretty rough, you can basically throw out the first section on the Anglo Saxons as an inferior product but after he finds his feet it's one of my favorite history podcast of all time. I know he was thinking about redoing the Saxon episodes but I think he may have just done a history of the Saxons podcast seperatly later on to make up for his early product.