FMS-Blog : The Wildly Whimsical, Mostly Musical WebLog
Saturday, October 14, 2006
Experience Today
The cliché goes that there is no substitute for experience; that, no matter what you know and what you learn in this life, until you’ve ‘done it’ none of those pieces of information are worth anything.
And, yet, our entire culture rests upon the experiences not of our own but of those who have gone before us. We know about what these people did and how they were motivated by reading accounts of their deeds and (in some cases) seeing multimedia representations of their actions, but we did not live it and, even when we are among the remaining physical evidence of these achievements, we do not experience any of their roots first hand.
Take the Eiffel Tower as an example: construction started on the project in 1887, before most every living person on earth today was even born, let alone had any real experience of the building process at the time. But when we stand beneath the enormous, steel structure that reaches 1000ft into the Paris skyline, defining a city and standing as a monument to the creative ingenuity of an entire continent, we feel we know it personally – it speaks directly to us in the here and now. Knowledge of what it must have been like to have played a part in putting the tower together for it’s unveiling at the Exposition Universelle in 1889 can be gathered by reading the firsthand descriptions by onlookers, but we’ll never actually live it. Equally, sources detail how the cables for the lifts were severed during the German occupation of France in the second world war, so that Hitler would have to walk up the stairs if he wanted to be at the top of the tower (in the end, he stayed on the ground while others took the Nazi swastika to the summit). Born in 1976, how could I possibly even imagine what it must have been like for the people of Allied Europe to watch these events unfolding? Of course, I can but sympathise.
The point I’m getting at is that we all rely more heavily than could be expressed on the experiences and achievements of those who have already passed – we have learned everything we know from them and only maintain a civilised society because the shadows of the past loom over us. Few living people can take credit for the vast majority of the things we see around us or for their significance. We simply take it all for granted and move forward, building on and around the experiences of others. So, in fact the opposite of the opening cliché is true: not only are knowledge and understanding good substitutes for experience but actually, in the absence of concrete experience, they are the only substitutes we can fall back on, for all else is dust.
And this brings me around to the inevitable question asked of anyone who, like me, cannot in all sincerity believe in the afterlife: what is the point of spending a lifetime gathering knowledge and firsthand experience of your own if it will all eventually fall away and lose any meaning it had? My answer: the point of seeking knowledge is for today’s experience and only that. Just as there is no one alive now to remember the construction of the Eiffel Tower, so in another hundred-or-so years the early 20th century will be confined to the history books and we will only leave objects and ideas behind for future generations to consider. This, I believe, is all the more reason to live for today.
And, yet, our entire culture rests upon the experiences not of our own but of those who have gone before us. We know about what these people did and how they were motivated by reading accounts of their deeds and (in some cases) seeing multimedia representations of their actions, but we did not live it and, even when we are among the remaining physical evidence of these achievements, we do not experience any of their roots first hand.
Take the Eiffel Tower as an example: construction started on the project in 1887, before most every living person on earth today was even born, let alone had any real experience of the building process at the time. But when we stand beneath the enormous, steel structure that reaches 1000ft into the Paris skyline, defining a city and standing as a monument to the creative ingenuity of an entire continent, we feel we know it personally – it speaks directly to us in the here and now. Knowledge of what it must have been like to have played a part in putting the tower together for it’s unveiling at the Exposition Universelle in 1889 can be gathered by reading the firsthand descriptions by onlookers, but we’ll never actually live it. Equally, sources detail how the cables for the lifts were severed during the German occupation of France in the second world war, so that Hitler would have to walk up the stairs if he wanted to be at the top of the tower (in the end, he stayed on the ground while others took the Nazi swastika to the summit). Born in 1976, how could I possibly even imagine what it must have been like for the people of Allied Europe to watch these events unfolding? Of course, I can but sympathise.
The point I’m getting at is that we all rely more heavily than could be expressed on the experiences and achievements of those who have already passed – we have learned everything we know from them and only maintain a civilised society because the shadows of the past loom over us. Few living people can take credit for the vast majority of the things we see around us or for their significance. We simply take it all for granted and move forward, building on and around the experiences of others. So, in fact the opposite of the opening cliché is true: not only are knowledge and understanding good substitutes for experience but actually, in the absence of concrete experience, they are the only substitutes we can fall back on, for all else is dust.
And this brings me around to the inevitable question asked of anyone who, like me, cannot in all sincerity believe in the afterlife: what is the point of spending a lifetime gathering knowledge and firsthand experience of your own if it will all eventually fall away and lose any meaning it had? My answer: the point of seeking knowledge is for today’s experience and only that. Just as there is no one alive now to remember the construction of the Eiffel Tower, so in another hundred-or-so years the early 20th century will be confined to the history books and we will only leave objects and ideas behind for future generations to consider. This, I believe, is all the more reason to live for today.
