One of the things about watching movies or TV shows multiple times is that certain phrases stick: they come back to you, triggered by odd connections your brain makes between the quotation and current experience. So today, looking through the list of events, I found three that provoked such echoes:
In 1790, Spanish officials were carrying out repairs on the Mexico City Cathedral, and came across carved a monolith buried near the foundation. It was carved on one side with icons arranged in a circle around a face believed to be that of the Aztec Sun god.
The line that sprang to mind here was “Captain, it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen before”, in Chekov’s voice from one or another episode of the original Star Trek series. The problem is that on reflection, the stone is like something we’ve seen before, because the Spanish Jesuit priests who accompanied the Conquistadors kept records and preserved some of the writings of the Aztecs. We can figure out some of the icons and some of the meanings of the stone’s inscriptions from its layout: it contains the history of man in four squares, marking eras separated by catastrophes of fire, flood, and wind. Circling these are rings that correspond to the Aztec calendar, which may identify dates of important events or the reigns of rulers; we aren’t sure. Those really are like nothing we’ve seen before. Their meaning, and the intent of the people who made them, remain hidden in the past.
The second was an event in 1297: the overthrow of King Kyawswa of Pagan. Here the line is Merlin’s from the movie Excalibur: “I never saw this!”
The all-knowing Merlin discovers something he doesn’t know. While I’m not all-knowing, I have a pretty good background in history, but one of the constant humbling reminders of the events list is the discovery not just of people I’ve never heard of, but whole kingdoms. Pagan was a kingdom in what is now Burma (Myanmar) which extended its rule for 250 years over the Irrawaddy valley. We don’t have a lot of direct evidence for the origins of the Pagan kingdom — few written records have survived from its early period — but around 1000 AD, the Pagan king reformed the irrigation system, increased rice production, and created a trade surplus that led to economic growth. By the 1200s, the state supported monumental architecture projects until the plains of Pagan resembled the plains of Aztec Mexico, dotted with pyramid temples rising into the sky.
My movie-quote response to the 1903 flight of the Kitty Hawk Flyer, which was the first sustained flight of a manned heavier-than-air powered and controlled aircraft, was “They do move in herds!”, the line Dr. Alan Grant speaks in Jurassic Park (the first one) when he realizes his theory about a particular dinosaur behavior is correct. The flight of the Kitty Hawk is also such a moment: planes can fly as the engineers predicted. The Wright brothers’ invention set off a new mode of transportation, a new way to see the world, from above, and a new way to connect people, places, and events.
The human mind is hungry for patterns and connections. It makes them even when they are absurd or very tenuous, but sometimes, those tenuous connections reveal fundamental similarities in the way we think, similarites about which we can have conversations, and on which we can build communities.