1090. Education, 6
(Armylè)
A - When you reach high school, you can learn a dead language like Italian, English or German if you’d like Prume.
P - In how many years?
A - In five years that will be. Years twenty-five and twenty-six.
Elyne realised something else bugging her after hearing all this.
E - Mom. Where is Italy?
A - It was in Europe, over the Mediterranean sea. I’ll show you on a map if you want.
She did want, and so did Prume.
When we returned home, I unearthed an old terrestrial globe covered with dust and painting stains. The tool had been useful for things other than geography for me in the past.
I scratched and peeled the layers revealing where Italy used to be, before the viral collapses. This scratchy shape and its surrounding islands, of warm lands surrounded by seas.
They couldn’t really picture how it looked like, as neither could I honestly.
E - And where are we?
I tilted the globe, and pointed at a specific mark near the middle of Antarctica. We were not too far from an ocean seen at this scale, just a few hundreds of kilometres of desert and then the Transatlantic chain to cross. Then the Ross sea was open to the middle of the Pacific ocean.
E - What country was it before?
A - That’s become irrelevant a long time ago. I’m not sure.
E - Countries don’t exist anymore?
A - Only ours sweetie. Everything else is ancient history. Don’t worry, you will learn more about it next year in school I’m sure.
P - We will learn what happened before?
A - Yes exactly. All the history of the world, from the planet’s formation, prehistory and history. All until us and you. Over the years of middle school and high school. You will learn all of humankind’s history, and how it led to us and our city.
Undeniably.
~
The history of our world wasn’t as exhaustive or innocent as I wished it to be.
But historiography wasn’t taught just as much as our favourite story. Because history was unfortunately only the story we agree upon, not historic reality. The sooner you start digging, the more complex it all becomes, and our school teachers weren’t as versed in historiography as they ought to have been unfortunately.
And the cognitive bias bugged Elyne intuitively, very strongly.
She rose a curiosity about the world history I would have expected Prume to have rather. But it was Elyne who suddenly grew that teenager concern about it.
What had been, and whether it had been sugar coated with lies possibly.
Elyne had learnt how civilisations had grown, from earliest societies into all forms of countries. How history since the spreading of writing techniques had shaped the world for twelve thousand years and more. The most documented times logically.
And then, it all fell apart in the dark century. The one our history was all too short and quiet about.
How changes so violent and consequential as the disappearance of countries just happen like that? And the viruses tale came long after these time chronologically. But the age of Noir we had very little details about.
Because it was the century of worldwide war between the emerging superpower we would become, and everything else condemned to fade from the old paradigm. It was the time when our social pragmatism reached its genocidal peaks. And we kept no memory of it, no memorial, no day or statue, not a note to remember anything from our past. I wouldn’t learn this either for many more years.
And at the time I simply felt lost like Elyne, hearing the incongruous tale of our logical rise to dominion over the world. Solaris, was our nickname already. But the centuries old meaning had been completely lost to us.
Elyne was eager to learn what didn’t make easily understandable sense. And unfortunately she would be growingly frustrated by the history served to her.
~
Elyne didn’t understand. She had a mania of pulling along her antenna like a lock of hair when she was trying to understand something she couldn’t grasp the logic of.
She wondered what the past could have been and be felt like. Elyne was daydreaming a lot on this new year. She had her insatiate curiosity for world history now. She thought about it and dreamt. And the concept itself of the entire world’s history, she was realising it could never be fulfilled.
Thousands of years too easily simplified, or too complex to read about everything and understand correctly. It bugged her, as she grew like Prume did before from the understanding of simple story telling, small linear anecdotes, to a cobweb of infinite complexity and immense amount of trends and events.
It frustrated her. One can learn a story entirely. But the entire world History, it was out of reach in so many ways. It had to be betrayed and simplified, and then it wasn’t real anymore, but just another story that didn’t fit in the grander reality.
She was just a particle lost in a sea. Even if history was over as we all thought in a way. Getting the thoughts and considerations upside down, she felt overwhelmed, insignificant, getting her existential crisis about her self-importance in history and reality now.
Facing the history of the world, she realised she was nothing. Her existence was meaningless and pointless. Her first bigger perspectives of meta-cognition. It always hurts a little the first time sweetie.
So Elyne was thinking a lot about her place in the world, and she realised she didn’t really know what the world was truly. And the vertigo kept her twirling for a long time. Realising she wouldn’t ever fully grasp the whole of the world’s reality or history, she was left to fall and try her best to find a new balance clinging to something.
She lost confidence in herself for a while because of that, and was a little apathetic or gloomy for a while. I was confident she would find her way and rebuild herself more mature rapidly.
She was curious and bewildered by the vastness of the world unknown to her. The Earth, and its endless history. She was still little, she realised that. She was floating in these foggy understandings, trying to eat enough knowledge to build some steady ground, but that didn’t seem to happen just yet.
Of course she didn’t like that. And her slight depression lasted longer than I expected.
I saw my sporty girl now sluggish and daydreaming for hours on end, voicing out existential doubts even I didn’t quite understand. That had gone further than I thought it could.
Elyne was struggling inside, trying to swallow the story, so called history of the world being taught to her. It didn’t satiate. And reality was too big to handle. Elyne was trying to figure out a way out of this conundrum and struggling to accept the limit to her reality. She was dreaming and thinking a lot in the end, but as she grew tired the logical threads of her thoughts trying to build something became erratic, and eventually lost.
It was an impossible problem anyway, unfortunately for her.
~
Elyne was in doubts lately. Prume wasn’t.
She was still with absolute confidence toward her sister. Elyne was Prume’s virtuous model in a way, and she looked up to her.
So even if it was unusual for Elyne to behave this way, Prume didn’t mind. She eagerly accompanied her in these seldom moments of thinking and reveries. As if they were reading together.
The meditations eventually faded over time, but it had been a peaceful growth period for them. School periods and holidays followed, with ups and downs for both of them. History wasn’t the best of topics to study nowadays.
Nevertheless, Elyne remained cheerful, and kept pulling her sister along for every new possible adventure she could think off. And Prume eagerly followed and tried everything offered to her with a smile.
Elyne was always with some scratches and scabs. My boyish monkey. Nothing bad. She wasn’t collecting wounds dressings, but was loving to run and climb, so much she was getting good at it. I was thankful for her skin to heal so fast and so well. And the sight of her blood didn’t bother her nearly as much as it should have. She didn’t mind spilling some and hurting herself a little, if it meant a good jump and run.
So they often ran outside the house to play with a friend somewhere or in some random park or sport centre. I didn’t bother asking anymore. I just told them to take care as they ran by, accepting my parenting time was already somewhat over. It didn’t last nearly as long as I wished or thought it might. Before I knew it, they were mostly helping each other and making by even without me. Although I would mind if they didn’t clean themselves and their room sufficiently. But they seem to be doing all too well...
Oh dear me.
~
