moneek

I am reading a book and come across the sentence: “The universe extends as far as the human imagination can reach.” I linger over it, because I realise that almost everything we know about ancient humanity has reached us through what managed to survive the people themselves, while the most boundless part of their existence, the world they carried within their consciousness, has disappeared irretrievably. Archaeology can reconstruct the outlines of a settlement, determine the purpose of an object, or establish which plants were cultivated six thousand years ago. But it cannot tell us what it meant for a person to fall asleep believing that beyond the world familiar to them, another continued, inhabited by presences they had never seen, yet whose reality was no less convincing to them than the ground beneath their feet. I am particularly preoccupied by those conceptions that were never recorded, because no one suspected that a time would come when it would be necessary to prove their very existence. How many cosmologies have vanished without leaving the name of a deity, a description of the afterlife, or a single account of the world's origins? How many different conceptions of time, death, and human purpose belonged to societies of which only a few stone tools and traces of hearths remain today? Here an uncomfortable thought arises for the historian: we know ancient humanity primarily through those parts of it that possessed the means to preserve their own conceptions. Writing gave certain civilisations the possibility of being present in the future in a way denied to countless others. Thus, humanity's memory inevitably acquires an uneven geography, while the silence of some societies is sometimes mistakenly taken as evidence of the poverty of their spiritual life. But the absence of testimony is not evidence of the absence of thought. This is precisely why I feel a certain distrust towards the confidence with which the modern world sometimes describes the inner lives of people separated from us by tens of thousands of years. We can establish the chemical composition of the pigment used to paint an animal, but not reconstruct the entirety of meanings its image evoked in the mind of its creator. We can see how a dead person was laid to rest without knowing whether those who buried them imagined a continuation of their existence. And I find myself thinking that the greatest loss inflicted by time is not the disappearance of ancient cities, but the disappearance of possible worlds that once existed within human consciousness. Worlds that will never again be conceived in quite the same way. For even if we discover every object left behind by a vanished society, we will never fully reconstruct its universe. We will possess the remains of its material life, but not the limits of the imagination within which that life acquired meaning. And then I understand why the sentence made me stop reading. Perhaps the most boundless thing in human history is not what ancient people did not know about the universe, but what we will never know about the universes they imagined.