Tag Archives: Star Trek

The author on a blue background wearing Apple AirPods.

On Machinery

On Machinery – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, for the penultimate post of the Wednesday Blog, how machinery needs constant maintenance to keep functioning.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:%5B1%5D Surekha Davies, “Walter Raleigh’s headless monsters and annotation as thinking,” in Strange and Wonderous: Notes from a Science Historian, (6 October 2025).[2] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.
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This week, for the penultimate post of the Wednesday Blog, how machinery needs constant maintenance to keep functioning.

I am just old enough to remember life before the ubiquity of computers. I had access to our family computer as long as I can remember, and to my grandparents’ computer at their condo when we stayed with them in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago. Yet even then my computer usage was limited often to idle fascination. I did most of my schoolwork by hand through eighth grade, only switching from writing to typing most of my work when I started high school and was issued a MacBook by my school. I do think that a certain degree of whimsy and humanity has faded from daily life as we’ve so fully adopted our ever newly invented technologies. Those machines can do things that in my early childhood would’ve seemed wonderous. Recently, I thought how without knowing how powerful and far-reaching my computer is as a vehicle for my research and general curiosity, I would be happy, delighted in fact, if my computer could conduct one function, say if it had the ability to look up any street address in the United States as a device connected to the US Postal Service’s database. That alone would delight me. Yet that is the function of not just one application on my computer but merely one of many functions of several such programs I can load on this device, and not only can I look up addresses in the United States but I can look up addresses in any country on this planet.

With the right software downloaded onto this computer I can read any document printed or handwritten in all of human history and leave annotations and highlights without worrying about damaging the original source. Surekha Davies wrote warmly in favor of annotating in her newsletter this week, and I appreciated her take on the matter.[1] In high school, I was a bit of a prude when it came to annotating; I found that summer reading assignment in my freshman and sophomore English classes to be almost repulsive because I see a book as a work of art crafted by its author, editor, and publisher to be a very specific way. To annotate, I argued, was like drawing a curly-cue mustache on the Mona Lisa, a crude act at best. Because of this I process knowledge from books differently. I now often take photos of individual pages and organize them into albums on my computer which I can then consult if I’m writing about a particular book, in much the same fashion that I use when I’m in the archive or special collections room looking at a historical text.

All of these images can now not only be sorted into my computer’s photo library, now stored in the cloud and accessible on my computer and phone alike, but they can also be merged together into one common PDF file, the main file type I use for storing primary and secondary sources for my research. With advances in artificial intelligence, I can now use the common top-level search feature on my computer to look within files for specific characters, words, or phrases to varying levels of accuracy. This is something that was barely getting off the ground when I started working on my doctorate six years ago, and today it makes my job a lot easier; just my file folder containing all of the peer-reviewed articles I’ve used in my research since 2019 contains 349 files and is 887.1 MB in size.

Our computers are merely the latest iterations of machines. The first computer, Charles Babbage’s (1791–1871) counting machine worked in a fairly similar fashion to our own albeit built of mechanical levers and gears where ours have intricate electronics in their hard drives. I, like many others, was introduced to Babbage and his difference engine by seeing the original in the Science Museum in London. This difference engine was a mechanical calculator intended to compute mathematical functions. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) both developed similar mechanisms in the seventeenth century and still older the Ancient Greek 2nd century BCE Antikythera mechanism can complete some of the same functions. Yet between all of these the basic idea that a computer works in mathematical terms remains the same even today. For all the linguistic foundations of computer code, the functions of any machine burn down to the binary operations of ones and zeros. I wrote last year in this blog about my befuddlement that artificial intelligence has largely been created on verbal linguistic models and was only in 2024 being trained on mathematical ones.[2] Yet even then those mathematical models were understood by the A.I. in English, making their computations fluent only in one specific dialect of the universal language of mathematics making their functionality mostly useless for the vast majority of humanity.

Yet I wonder how true that last statement really is? After all, I a native English speaker with recent roots in Irish learned grammar like many generations of my ancestors through learning to read and write in Latin. English grammar generally made no sense to me in elementary school, it is after all very irregular in a lot of ways, and so it was only after my introduction to a very orderly language, the one for which our Roman alphabet was first adapted, that I began to understand how English works. The ways in which we understand language in a Western European and American context rely on the classical roots of our pedagogy influenced in their own time by medieval scholasticism, Renaissance humanism, and Enlightenment notions of the interconnectedness of the individual and society alike. I do not know how many students today in countries around the globe are learning their mathematics through English in order to compete in one of the largest linguistic job markets of our time. All of this may well be rendered moot by the latest technological leap announced by Apple several weeks ago that their new AirPods will include a live translation feature acting as a sort of Babel Fish or universal translator depending on which science fiction reference you prefer.

Yet those AirPods will break down eventually. They are physical objects, and nothing which exists in physical space is eternal. Shakespeare wrote it well in The Temepst that 

“The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

As dreams are made on, and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.” (4.1.170-175)

For our machines to last, they must be maintained, cleaned, given breaks just like the workers who operate them lest they lose all stamina and face exhaustion most grave. Nothing lasts forever, and the more those things are allowed to rest and recuperate the more they are then able to work to their fullest. So much of our literature from the last few centuries has been about fearing the machines and the threat they pose. If we are made in the Image of God then machines, our creation, are made in the image of us. They are the products of human invention and reflect back to us ourselves yet without the emotion that makes us human. Can a machine ever feel emotion? Could HAL-9000 feel fear or sorrow, could Data feel joy or curiosity? And what of the living beings who in our science fiction retrofitted their bodies with machinery in some cases to the extent that they became more machine than human? What emotion could they then feel? One of the most tragic reveals for me in Doctor Who was that the Daleks (the Doctor’s main adversaries) are living beings who felt so afraid and threatened that they decided to encase the most vital parts of their physical bodies in wheelchair tanks, shaped like pepper shakers no less, rendering them resilient adversaries for anyone who crossed them. Yet what remained of the being inside? I urge caution with suggestions of the metaverse or other technological advances that draw us further from our lived experiences and more into the computer. These allow us to communicate yet real human emotion is difficult to express beyond living, breathing, face-to-face interactions.

After a while these machines which have our attention distract us from our lives and render us blind to the world around us. I liked to bring this up when I taught Plato’s allegory of the cave to college freshmen in my Western Civilization class. I conclude the lesson by remarking that in the twenty-first century we don’t need a cave to isolate ourselves from the real world, all we need is a smartphone and a set of headphones and nothing else will exist. I tried to make this humorous, in an admittedly dark fashion, by reminding them to at least keep the headphones on a lighter mode so they can hear their surroundings and to look up from their phone screen when crossing streets lest they find themselves flattened like the proverbial cartoon coyote on the front of a city bus. 

If we focus too much on our machines, we lose ourselves in the mechanism, we forget to care for ourselves and attend to our needs. The human body is the blueprint for all human inventions whether physical ones like the machine or abstract like society itself. As I think further about the problems our society faces, I conclude that at the core there is a deep neglect of the human at the heart of everything. I see this in the way that disasters are reported on in the press: often the financial toll is covered before the human cost, clearly demonstrating that the value of the dollar outweighs the value of the human. In abdicating ourselves to our own abstractions and social ideals we lose the potential to change our course, repair the machinery, or update the software to a better version with new security patches and fixes for glitches old and new. In spite of our immense societal wealth, ever advancing scientific threshold, and technological achievement we still haven’t gotten around to solving hunger, illiteracy, or poverty. In spite of our best intentions our worst instincts keep drawing us into wars that only a few of us want.The Mazda Rua, my car, is getting older and I expect if I keep driving it for a few years or more it’ll eventually need more and more replacement parts until it becomes a Ship of Theseus, yet is not the idea of a machine the same even if its parts are replaced? That idea is the closest I can come to imagining a machine having a soul as natural things like us have. The Mazda Rua remained the Mazda Rua even after its brakes were replaced in January and its slow leaking tire was patched in May. Yet as it moves into its second decade, that old friend of mine continues to work in spite of the long drives and all the adventures I’ve put it through. Our machinery is in desperate need of repair, yet a few of us see greater profit from disfunction than they figure they would get if they actually put in the effort, money, and time to fix things. If problems are left unattended to for long periods of time they will eventually lead to mechanical failure. The same is true for the machinery of the body and of the state. Sometimes a good repair is called for, reform to the mechanisms of power which will make the machine work better for its constituent parts. In this moment that need for reform is being met with the advice of a bad mechanic looking more at his bottom line than at the need of the mechanism he’s agreed to repair. Only on this level the consequences of mechanical failure are dire.

[1] Surekha Davies, “Walter Raleigh’s headless monsters and annotation as thinking,” in Strange and Wonderous: Notes from a Science Historian, (6 October 2025).

[2] “Asking the Computer,” Wednesday Blog 5.26.

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The First Quarter-Century

The First Quarter-Century – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, to begin Season 5, I discuss some hopes of mine for the first quarter of the twenty-first century through reflections on three things that I imagined might be possible twenty-five years ago. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, to begin Season 5, I discuss some hopes of mine for the first quarter of the twenty-first century through reflections on three things that I imagined might be possible twenty-five years ago.

25 years ago, I was a young boy of 7 when I witnessed the ringing in of the New Year 2000 in my Aunt Jennie’s living room. I was a new arrival here in Kansas City, having only lived here for close to six months, and surrounded by people and places that were fairly new to me. The end of the twentieth century was a significant turning point in my life. It meant that I would be a part of the first generation to grow to adulthood in the third millennium of the current era. Despite this I’ve always felt drawn to the 1990s as the decade when I planted my roots and began to seek out an understanding of my world and what might lie beyond.

I remember throughout the day sitting in front of the television set watching several things, including my first viewing of Star Trek: The Next Generation, whichever channel it was showed “The Best of Both Worlds” Parts 1 and 2. Yet they also cut to the new year’s celebrations in cities around our planet. I remember seeing the fireworks go off atop the Sydney Harbour Bridge and later along the Thames. At 11 pm our time we watched the ball drop in Times Square, and then again, an hour later the networks rebroadcast that ball drop for us living in the Central Time Zone. We stayed the night with my Aunt Jennie and cousins Chelsea and Isabella and then drove north to Smithville, Missouri on the morning of New Year’s Day to buy a new sofa before returning to the farm my parents bought the previous summer where we were still building our house. That winter we lived in a 10-foot long trailer that had to be moved into the farm’s barn in the winter to keep it from blowing over in the high winter winds. This way at least we could be on the build site so my parents could be around to oversee the entire process of our house being built. The only other thing of note from New Year’s 2000 was that it was the last time I visited the town of Smithville until February 2019 when I gave a public lecture at the Smithville branch of the Midcontinent Public Library system. I’ve since made the trip to that northern Kansas City suburb once more in April 2024 in a vain effort at seeing the Northern Lights when I could’ve stayed home and seen them perfectly well in the city.

As New Year’s 2025 approached this year then I began to reflect on my memories of New Year’s 2000. In all honesty it was the first New Year’s that I can remember staying up for, let alone my first New Year’s in Kansas City. It’s one holiday that I’ve continuously celebrated in this city ever since. Yet what I’ve been thinking about more is what I was reading at the time about future technologies that were just around the corner. On a recent episode of the Startalk podcast hosted by Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson of the Hayden Planetarium in New York and Comedian Chuck Nice they interviewed Dr. Charles Liu, a professor of astrophysics at the City University of New York, Dr. Tyson talked about how the most futuristic thing that he looked forward to from the original 1960s Star Trek series were the videophones that they used. I too remember an entry in one of my childhood factbooks that I loved reading around the millennium which included one of these as one of the great up and coming technologies. While we may not have landline telephones with video capabilities like that entry suggested our portable smart phones all largely have this very function. The funny thing about it is that I rarely use FaceTime on my iPhone. Looking at my call logs the last FaceTime videocall I made was in March 2024 when I was excited to show off the room upgrade that I got in a hotel in the Chicago Loop to my parents. We’d stayed at that same hotel together several years before in the week between Christmas and New Year’s and had half the space for the three of us that I had in this room on my own.

A Tandberg E20, the sort of videophone I expected we’d all have.

I tend to make more videocalls on my computer over Zoom, FaceTime, WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger and very rarely over Skype which Zoom largely replaced in 2020. Zoom has become the de facto videocall platform for many of us, especially in professional contexts. I even use Zoom to record lectures thanks to its screen sharing features. I do wish the technology could improve further though. It would be great to have an easier way to have the camera be set up higher so that it’s not looking up at me but instead straight-on or slightly downward. While an aesthetic preference it also speaks again to the old Star Trek ship-to-ship on screen communications seen in all of the series. Star Wars’s holographic communications would be an even neater step forward, and while I remember seeing a story about how the French left-wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon used holography in his bid in the 2022 French presidential election and another that ABBA is touring again in holographic form the technology still seems to be far from ubiquitous enough to be a regular form of communication.

An Air France Concorde at the Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum near Dulles Airport in Virginia.

Another technology that I remember dreaming about in 2000 that was in active commercial use then yet has lain dormant for most of the quarter-century since is supersonic flight. The Concorde last flew in 2003 thanks to its extreme cost and the fatal crash at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport in 2000. Yet I remember my Mom often saying that she wanted to cross the Atlantic at least once on a supersonic jet. While there are many aspects of the in-flight experience on your average transatlantic flight that I enjoy, I do actually enjoy the food and movies in economy for the most part, I certainly wouldn’t mind a quicker jump across the water to Europe. The average supersonic flight between New York and London or Paris was 3.5 hours compared to the 7 hours it tends to take on subsonic aircraft. That’s closer to the travel time for a flight from the Midwest to Southern California today. Looking at supersonic aviation now and the promises of companies like Boom at restoring supersonic flight to commercial service, I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to someday fly on one of these planes. In the short term I’m more hopeful that Kansas City might finally get a nonstop service to one of the European capitals in time for our hosting duties in the 2026 FIFA World Cup. On my last return trip from Paris to Kansas City via Washington-Dulles while I enjoyed a great many aspects of the flight I do remember a growing sense of annoyance at how long it takes to get to Kansas City from Europe when compared to most other American cities our size and larger.

Finally, at the turn of the millennium one of my favorite TV shows was the natural history program Eyewitness co-produced by the publisher Doring Kindersley, Oregon Public Broadcasting, and the BBC. Surprisingly for how influential it’s been, I haven’t written about Eyewitness on the Wednesday Blog yet. This program brought the factual book series of the same to life for its viewers and set the stories of life, the universe, and everything it told in a computer-generated space it called the “Eyewitness Museum” which acted in some ways like a physical museum yet in many others with unusual camera angles and hallways it was entirely an edifice of the mind. I remember loving this series because it gave me the space to imagine and wonder at nature, the world, and human history in a manner which few other programs have done. I remember hoping that I could visit such a museum sometime in my life, and in some ways I’ve done that time and again. Many of the cultural artifacts in the program are on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and when it comes to the animals & plants on camera it’s well and truly on display in natural history museums around the globe that I’ve gotten to visit.

I rediscovered Eyewitness again in my early twenties when DK began uploading the episodes onto YouTube. By that point I’d already been making videos of my own for nearly a decade, and rewatching this old show from the ‘90s I was inspired to try to frame the material I wanted to describe in videos and in my teaching in a similar minimalist fashion on a blank white background with the object of my videos and lectures taking front and center. As it turns out, white is a much harder color on the eyes so in 2019 I switched to a light blue which I continue to use. My former students will certainly be quite familiar with my blue slideshows that form the core of my teaching materials. Those old Eyewitness episodes disappeared from YouTube in Fall 2023, in fact the last time I watched any of them was when I showed one to my seventh graders as part of their World Geography class.

Yet when thinking about the Eyewitness Museum itself the technology exists today that the viewer could tour that structure through virtual reality headsets. I still haven’t tried one of those on yet, at first from what I understood they didn’t fit over glasses, yet I’m curious about what potential they may hold for both education and entertainment. It would be fascinating to use such a headset to wander through that labyrinth of galleries famous for their all-white surfaces and see everything they hold.The last twenty-five years did not meet our expectations in many respects. Paul Krugman’s final editorial for the New York Times published on 9 December 2024 speaks to the loss of our millennial optimism in the face of 9/11, the Wars in Afghanistan & Iraq, the Great Recession, and all the other crises that have crashed on the rocky shores of our world. Where for a while we thought we might have fine sandy beaches that heralded a prosperous, safe, and happy future now we have fearsome cliffs which act as much as walls defending our “scepter’d isles” as limits to the possibilities of things in our world. I feel a dissonance in my own life with the world we live in because I am still an optimist, and still dream of things that we could do, new monuments to that optimism we could build, and like the Irish quarrymen brought to a young Kansas City in the nineteenth century by Fr. Bernard Donnelly, the founder of the Kansas City Irish community, ways in which we can break down those cliffs and build a city of fountains and gardens in its place. I’ll write more about all of this next week in a reflection on what I hope we will see realized in the next quarter of the twenty-first century. By the time we reach New Year’s 2050, I will be 57 years old, far from the young boy who watched humanity ring in the third millennium in what was for him a new city in a new time full of hope.

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The Versatility of Storytelling

The Versatility of Storytelling – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how the same tools can be used to weave a variety of different stories. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, how the same tools can be used to weave a variety of different stories.

My favorite sorts of stories are the ones where I feel that I’ve gotten to know the characters and can relate to them on a personal level; that these characters are either real people who I’ll never meet or entirely fictional is beside the point. I often remember the stories I was reading, or watching, or listening to more than the experiences from my own life that surrounded new tellings of those stories. This potent relationship is heightened in moments when my own life is dull or foreboding, as in the height of the recent Pandemic when I passed the long days of isolation in my Binghamton apartment or at home in Kansas City watching and reading stories in the Star Trek franchise which I only really began to discover in February and March of 2020.

I wanted to be a storyteller from my youth. I read a book by the Irish journalist Frank Delaney called Ireland which followed a young man as he discovered his own passion for storytelling by listening to the seanchaí who often visited his family’s home. I began to write for myself around this time, though my efforts were focused more on poetry and plays at first. A decade ago, I built up the endurance to write a longer-form short story called “Abducted and Abandoned,” and around that time started writing what today is The Wednesday Blog. By the time I was working on my first master’s degree in 2015 and 2016 I’d begun writing a longer work, my book Travels in Time Across Europe, which I self-published in 2017. That one tells the stories I collected from my year living in London, stories of my own adventures traveling from the British capital to other cities across Europe. At the time I imagined that it could become a sort of valuable source for readers seeking to understand the world as it was in that last year before the Brexit referendum and the rise of Trumpism swept across Britain and the United States.

Dr. Olivia Stephens, the main character of “Ghosts in the Wind.”

Like the main character of Delaney’s Ireland, I too went to university to study history, to use my passion for storytelling, and as things came about, I’m now close to earning my doctorate in the field. Today, besides my efforts here with the blog I largely am just writing things related to my research. Alongside my dissertation I currently have one encyclopedia entry soon to be published, a book chapter and a scholarly article submitted for editing and am now writing another article related to my translation of André Thevet’s Singularitez. I still try to write the odd bits of fiction, like “Carruthers Smith’s Museum” which I released two weeks ago, or “Ghosts in the Wind” which I’m quite proud of. Yet I haven’t written anything to be acted in years. That’s striking to me, because my first big scribal efforts were for the stage and screen in my high school years. I do have an idea for a play that I might turn to someday in the next few years, yet even writing that here fills me with a sense of loss because it could well become another project that I’m excited about and have good ideas for yet don’t ever get to.

What I love most about writing for the stage and screen is that there’s a chance I’ll get to hear my words interpreted into lived experiences. Ideas that once only existed in my mind could be seen by many others played out before them and enlivened by the actors who utter those words & all the designers of sets, sound, lighting, props, effects, and music who flesh out that lived experience into something relatable and emotional in its truth. In short, to see my words brought to life in performance is to see a world created from what was once my thoughts, the smallest and most intimate of stages that I alone know.

To this end then, I am awed by the versatility of those storytellers who create these worlds in their performances. My erstwhile dissertation advisor Dr. Richard Mackenney, a man for whom I have the deepest respect and consider a friend, often talked about his own experiences on stage playing characters created by Shakespeare alongside many of the greats of the British theatre. In his lectures I saw a performance like any revival of King Lear or any of the Henrys or Richards that Shakespeare wrote. My own lecturing has taken on this same quality, yes at least in part in flattery, because I saw how he kept the rapt attention of most of the 150 or so students in the lecture hall with his art.

In recent weeks I had the pleasure to see the English actor Ralph Fiennes play two very different yet still akin parts in the films Conclave and The Return. In the former, Fiennes plays Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, the Dean of the College of Cardinals who is tasked with managing a papal conclave on the death of the Pope. In the latter, Fiennes returns to the screen a mere month after he appeared cassocked as an English cardinal this time dressed in rags as Odysseus returned to Ithaca after 20 years away at war against Troy. To see the same man inhabit two characters who on the surface could not be more distinct is a profound testament to the man’s mastery of his art. Both films are pieces of theatre imagined with the realism of a certain type of cinema that is more European than American, with less effects and a minimalist score that has its roots in the French New Wave. In the American context it’s reminiscent of the minimalism that we see in some of the television dramas produced recently for their streaming service by Apple.

I felt that I could instantly relate to Cardinal Lawrence in spite of his high office. The finest leaders I’ve met, whether cardinals and bishops or mayors, senators, and ambassadors are all people first and foremost. They acknowledge the trappings of their offices yet retain the everyman spirit that makes them relatable. I saw this in Cardinal Lawrence more than in many of the other characters who populate the halls of the Vatican in Conclave. That he is an English Catholic cardinal speaks to the post-Reformation moment in which we now live when the old sectarian wars of religion feel behind us and reflects on the Catholic Church in England and Wales that I know from my year living there and going to Mass in London. He speaks for a certain Anglophonic ideal that is democratic yet still upholding of tradition and custom.

Ralph Fiennes as Cardinal Thomas Lawrence and Odysseus, in performances which premiered within a month of each other.

Odysseus in contrast is a man who has seen much and endured much more than I ever hope to. His pain is written across his mostly silent face, and in this role, Fiennes says more with a tortured look than with words. That he only acknowledges his own identity verbally once in the film is telling. This is a man who fears that he won’t be the man that his family have waited for over these twenty long years that he was away. I can merely relate in that I’ve noticed time and again how my home and my city change each time that I’m away. On this most recent return of my own from Mérida on 10 November I was startled in the weeks that followed to see that the last vestiges of the long summer we had in this region at last faded away into a brief Fall before receding into the winter cold far sooner than I expected. Even more dramatic was the city I found on my return from London at the end of August in 2016. Kansas City wasn’t the same place it had been even 8 months before when I flew home for Christmas. There were plenty of stories I’d missed while I was away, one relative who’d been born and who I met for the first time at a far later date than any of her cousins in the youngest generation of my family. In that loss that comes with being far from home I can relate, yet in the pain he suffered and inflicted while he was away at war, I am thankful to lack that experience.

Yet the brilliant versatility of storytelling here expresses itself in Fiennes’s ability to say so much with so little about the war he fought and the trials he faced on his homeward voyage. Odysseus suffered for his efforts, and in his suffering, I see his humanity & feel that I can relate to him. At the end of the film, I felt that I got to know Odysseus for the man he’d become, and that in spite of the Bronze Age setting and the far looser garments, in a film whose costumes are marked by a combination of loincloth & cloak, than anything I would wear, I felt that I could see myself, my own humanity in that moment in time on the island of Ithaca in the second millennium BCE, perhaps the 12th century BCE as the polymath Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276–194 BCE) dated the fall of Troy to 1183 BCE.Where both Conclave and The Return succeed is in placing the lives of their characters in moments and settings which feel real. Odysseus’s Ithaca feels as lived in as Cardinal Lawrence’s Vatican, yet the former seems to be set in a far brighter and younger world with different morals and values than the darker and starker built world which succeeded it in the monumental edifices of the Vatican. Yet both are in my imagination places which I now have visited & seen, and both are places that I would recognize again if I ever returned to them in my memory of those films, or should I ever venture there in my own life to the Vatican or to the Ionian Islands and Peloponnese where the filmmakers created their vision of Ithaca. That stage is as lived in as any seemingly sparser platform that Shakespeare’s Muse might have evoked in Henry V; it is as alive as any other that can be imagined in our art.

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The New Frontier

The New Frontier – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week on the Wednesday Blog, I try to remember a story for this week that I came up with on Saturday while lost in a parking garage. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week on the Wednesday Blog, I try to remember a story for this week that I came up with on Saturday while lost in a parking garage.

I will usually have a few ideas for the Wednesday Blog lying around in one of several repositories, including my memory of incidents that’ve happened within the last few days or weeks that might make for curious anecdotes for this weekly publication. This Saturday, while I was getting dinner on the Plaza on my way up to my evening shift at the Kauffman Center, I thought of one such idea that at the time seemed golden for this week. For some reason, walking back down the stairs from street level to where my car was parked underground, I found myself thinking about the first line of Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s opening monologue from Star Trek: The Next Generation, identical to the same line in Captain James Kirk’s monologue from the Original Series, “Space, the Final Frontier.” This idea of the frontier sticks with me because my own world here in the Midwest is so very new; where now there are tree-lined streets, parks, and fountains little more than a century ago was open prairie.

At the 1893 Columbian Exposition World’s Fair in Chicago, the American historian William Jackson Turner presented his famed Frontier Thesis, which argued that as of that moment the American frontier was well and truly closed; all land from Atlantic to Pacific was taken, bought, or occupied by some one or another. Turner, a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, made this point to mark 1893 as a major turning point in American history from the age when our culture was defined by the endless frontier extending far out beyond the horizon to a distant and nigh mythic Pacific Ocean and towards a new world where the United States was an island unto itself, with travel from New York to San Francisco possible in a matter of days by rail. Today, of course, the same journey can be made in about 6 hours by plane, and for much of my life I’ve heard of Alaska as the new frontier and, like the two Captains of my favorite science fiction series, Space as the final frontier.

Yet I think there’s another frontier that bears consideration, one which is far more personal to each of us. I stand today looking at my own life and childhood with a great degree of nostalgia, and especially now that I am spending my days with students who are going through those same moments, I often want to connect with them by remarking about how I was doing this or that when I was their age. Yet, it is hard for me to reconcile that these people are living out their adolescent years in the early 2010s and not the early 2000s as I did. Their world is a new frontier for me, one that is far more digital, one that is far more interconnected, and one that is in many ways far more dangerous than my own.

I’ve long thought about how different things would be if I had children for them compared to my own life. If I were to have children this year in 2023, they would be in middle school in the early 2030s and graduate high school in 2041, a full 30 years after I did. This is almost equal to the same gap that I have with my parents, yet to me the cultural and technological differences between even today in 2023 with what I knew in 2011 are in some ways far greater than what I remember being around when I was little in the mid and late 1990s that my parents lived with in their teenage and young adult years in the 1980s. It is harder for me to understand some of this generation because my experiences are far more framed in the world that existed when I was born, and as much as I look forward to the futures that this century could hold, I still feel a close connection to the century that formed my own existence.

This is all a very linear way of thinking about time and even space. It could be that echoes of moments from my own past keep appearing in my present as I experience this new period in my life. The frontier of full-time employment has been reached, and I’ve chosen for the moment to cross its threshold into whatever its potentials may hold. I look back at my life from just a few months ago with some wistful longing for the days before I was constantly needing to be my best self, the days when I had plenty of time to get all of the things I need to complete done. There are always echoes in my memory which announce themselves in the present, from the way the sunlight shines nebulously in the sky on a morning after an overnight rain to the new takes on old hymns we sang in my elementary school Masses each week. I find myself remembering the people I knew and loved in my past and see a great deal of them in those I surround myself with now.

I hope that as I move further into this new frontier I will be glad to see what it has to offer, what ideas it will inspire in me, and how I can continue to grow, hopefully, to become the person who people will remember in centuries long after I and all those around me are gone when perhaps humans will have begun venturing out from our home planet to seek their own new frontiers deep in the void of Space.

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Suspending Disbelief

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I’ve always been someone who has a hard time focusing on the world around me in the immediate aftermath of leaving a cinema. The story played out before my eyes in rich and large visual colors and resounding about my ears in the surround sound systems used in modern cinemas is entrapping and beguiling to say the least. Every film I have ever gone to see, that I can remember, has been met by this same internal thought process as soon as the picture ends and I wander back out into the lobby. I imagine myself in the story, in its settings, walking and talking with its characters. I guess I’ve always been a bit of a day dreamer.

I’ve also been a storyteller for much of my life. Much of those energies that were once spent inventing fabulous fables of remote realities and fantasies in my youth are now often spent trying to think through my professional writing, both here at The Wednesday Blog and in my research. Still, I do like to daydream from time to time. I find it helps me focus on the good things in life. Those dreams are less extraordinary than they used to be, they are populated less by characters from the books and films I enjoy than by my own hopes for the future, however domestic and ordinary those hopes may be.

In recent months as I’ve allowed more of the dolor of our times creep into my thoughts, I’ve found my ability to daydream has become less and less pronounced. Maybe that’s what C. S. Lewis meant in The Last Battle when he said that of all the Pevensie children, the only one not to return to Narnia in its last days was Susan because she had grown up and didn’t believe in those stories anymore. Yet this fading ability to daydream has left me somewhat bereft. I find I’m less able to write when I can’t imagine a happy future. I’m less able to tell the stories I know both recent and quite ancient when I can’t imagine my own near and distant future. So, I hold onto that need for dreams, and do my best to keep that fire of my imagination alive despite the troubles of our time and the worries seemingly inherent in adulthood.

Over the last few weeks since I returned to Binghamton, I decided to watch a series of films that I loved as a child but hadn’t seen in full for at least a decade. Yet now with the extended editions of The Lord of the Ringson HBO Max I figured it’d be fun to see them again, and not only to remember them as I knew them years ago, but to relive those stories as an adult with everything that I know now guiding my eyes and ears through that modern epic. I often like to think of these sorts of stories that I enjoy, whether they be Tolkien’s legendarium or the near future of Star Trek, along the same general continuum of time and thought. Yet I quickly found myself asking the question, “how can these stories of a far distant past fit into what I know of the world and its origins?” The rational thinker in me posed a fundamental question about suspending disbelief.

So, how do I rationalize these stories of some ancient primordial past just before the dawn of human memory when we weren’t the only such people to walk this Earth? That after all is the setting of The Lord of the Rings, a time long lost when the Earth was young. There are plenty of old stories that tell of an age when humans lived alongside more supernatural creatures, whether they be the monsters and demigods of Greek mythology or the Tuatha Dé Dannán of the distant Irish mythic past. Tolkien set his stories in this same vein, they are a modern recreation of those old myths, those old epics & sagas that he loved so much. And those stories come from a different world than our own, one where the long history of the Earth cannot be explained by evolution or science, but where all things are created through divine music, described in the opening of Tolkien’s Silmarillion.

I for one do feel that there’s still a way to balance the old stories with the new. Our modern narrative for the creation of the Universe, of which the creation of the Earth and all life upon it is but a small verse, is yet another one of these stories. Yet among all the stories our modern one, our new one, is grounded in an understanding of the rational roots of Creation; it sings less of God and angels, supernatural spirits guiding the world into being, and more of Creation urging itself into existence through the very energy that burns at the heart of all things. I still think there’s room for these old stories in our new one, there’s room for us to acknowledge and embrace ancient interpretations of how we came to be in that we are richer for knowing what our ancestors thought and believed.

Tolkien’s stories are beautiful in their own way. They echo the great myths and sagas of the myriad cultures of Europe. They remind me of the Penguin translations of the old Irish myths that I read as a boy and could recite from memory today. Suspending disbelief allows us to let ourselves go from our lives, even for a few moments, and experience something incredible that we otherwise would not. 

As The Return of the King finished on the evening of Labor Day, I found myself wondering what different characters from the Star Trek series would think of The Lord of the Rings and its characters. What would Spock make of the elves and their similar anatomy to his own Vulcans? What would Worf make of the fierce warriors of Rohan steeped in their honor charging to certain death before the walls of Minis Tirith? What can I learn from these two different yet similar stories of people trying to make their world a better place? I think the answer lies in the question. I’m drawn to stories such as The Lord of the Rings and Star Trek because they offer hope even in the darkest of times. The Hobbits prove that even the smallest among us can save the world, and Star Trek offers us today a vision of a better tomorrow that may still come. And if I need to suspend disbelief, if I need to shake the scales of my worldly cynicism from my eyes in order to see those two hopeful lights in the darkest night, then it’s worth doing.

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A Trek Among the Stars

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I first started watching Star Trek a month before the first waves of the pandemic hit the U.S. early in 2020. I knew a fair bit about the characters of the different series and some of the overarching stories, so when Star Trek: Picard was released in February 2020 I figured I wanted to see what it was all about. Thus began the next two years of my life in terms of TV viewing. Since then, I’ve gone all in and seen the entirety of the first two seasons of Picard, with a third coming in February 2023, as well as all seven seasons of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, all four seasons of Enterprise, and what’s so far been released of Lower Decks, and Strange New Worlds. I’m now watching the original series, Star Trek starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelly that aired between September 1966 and June 1969 on NBC.

Like with the other Trek series, I’ve found the characters relatable and enjoyable to watch. I’ve also found some of the futuristic settings and technologies depicted on the show inspirational to my own imagination as a storyteller. Yet I’ll freely admit I find this series harder to get excited about compared to the later Trek series released in the ’80s,’90s, and 2000s, perhaps because this original Star Trek sought to depict the future of the late 23rd century as the 1960s dreamed it might be, whereas the later series looked to the late 24th century as the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s aspired it to be. Being a child of the ’90s and 2000s, that post-Cold War worldview fits my own far more closely than the background surrounding the Original Series during my parents’ childhood in the ’60s.

Still, when I do get into an episode of the first of these shows, I often find I do like the stories. They’re in the same spirit as other mid-century sci-fi shows that I’ve always admired like The Twilight Zone or the older William Hartnell era Doctor Who serials. What’s more, the vibrant colors used to light the sets of Star Trekalways catch my eye in a way that keeps me focused on the action of the story.

So, a few months ago when I learned there was a recreation of the sets of the Starship Enterprise in a building in Ticonderoga, New York, I knew I had to pay a visit. I arranged things with my good friend Alex Brisson, and we made a weekend trip out of it, visiting the Star Trek: The Original Series Set Tour around noon on Saturday, 17 September. The sets were built by a local guy named James Cawley, who interned on the production of Star Trek: The Next Generation at Paramount. Over the intervening years, the team in Ticonderoga have built with meticulous detail the sets of that original Enterprise as they appeared on the soundstages at Desilu Studios in the late ’60s. In many ways, the tour is both an opportunity for fans to experience walking on board the Enterprise as much as it is for film and TV buffs like myself to see what a TV set from the ’60s would have looked like.

When we walked on the bridge and saw all the stations set out in their circle, the captain’s chair in the center of the room, most of the people in our tour were hushed, a sense of respect among us. I got a chance to sit in the chair, as did everyone there, and I’ll admit the picture of me sitting there looks a fair bit deer-in-headlights as I couldn’t decide what to focus on with so much around me to see. For me, the original Trek isn’t necessarily the show that I prefer the most, that’d have to be Deep Space Nine with Next Generation and Voyager close behind it, but it spoke to a common thread in my life over the past two years as I’ve continued with my own work and studies while in the evenings taking an hour or two to watch another story set a few centuries down the line.

I think the thing that has kept me so interested in Star Trek is how aspirational it is. Unlike so many other futuristic films and shows out there, in the stories told here humanity has figured out how to get out of our cycles of violence and greed and work with the best parts of our nature to achieve the closest we could ever come to returning to Paradise here in our own mortal lives. They are stories that say, “no matter how bad things may be now, no matter how much the pandemic and all the other troubles that came out of it have become, there’s always hope.” 

I’ve always been one to trust in the fundamental goodness of humanity, it’s an idea that really does have some deep roots in my Catholic faith, as well as in my lived experiences. I’ve been fortunate to live the life I’ve led so far, in the places I’ve lived and with the people I’ve known, family and friends who I’ve loved. The seeds of a better future are laid in that fertile soil of hope. Had I grown up in the midst of the wars that my country waged over the last 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq or in a country with less opportunities for success than my own, my worldview would likely be quite different. Yet if we are going to ever get out of this mire we’ve been in for so long, our adolescence as a species as Carl Sagan put it in his novel Contact, then we’ve got to let our hope for a better tomorrow guide us just as much as our cynicism and bad memories of past wrongs guide us now.

In the future that Star Trek depicts humanity finally begins to overcome our faults in the last half of the current century when first contact between humans and an alien species, in this case Vulcans, occurs. Our technology, and their helping hand (however hesitant it may be) moves humanity up from an age of nation states and superpowers battling each other for supremacy and resources on Earth and into a new age where humanity is one small island in the great ocean of Space, learning to live amid our galactic neighbors, and finally contributing to the creation of a Federation of Planets in the mid 22nd century that brings about a new Golden Age of sorts not just to us on Earth but to many other worlds floating in this cosmic sea.

It’s fiction, I’m well aware of that. It’s a collection of stories dreamed up by writers and showrunners over the past six decades that could very well remain stories in our cultural memory. But maybe there is some room for our future to be more peaceful, more prosperous, and more equitable than our present is or our past ever has been. In the decades since Star Trek first premiered in 1966 so many technologies inspired by the shows have become realities from tablets to personal communicators to now virtual reality taking the place of the holodecks and holosuites of the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. I’ve been drawn to these stories because they came at just the right time for me. I began watching Voyager in the long dark winter of 2021 when I was preparing for my Comprehensive Exams. That winter, being so far from home and so isolated by the continuing pandemic, I found the story of a lone ship lost 70,000 light years from home to resound with my own situation. These are stories that laud curiosity and teamwork, and while just stories with the odd bizarre plot or weekly new alien with different nose ridges, they offer us a vision of what our world could be like.

Why not give that future a try?

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Physical Books or Electronic Books

Photo by Janko Ferlic on Pexels.com

Welcome to Season 2 of the Wednesday Blog Podcast!

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There’s a Thomas Jefferson quote that has stuck with me since the first time I saw it in the room at the Library of Congress that houses his first donation to that institution: “I cannot live without books.” It’s something I think of from time to time, looking around the office here in my apartment at the tall bookshelves lined with volumes covering topics from astronomy to ancient literature in Latin and Greek to Catholic theology to history, politics, and fiction. I collect books, largely to read but also because I love the potential that books hold; all the stories they have waiting to be revealed page by page.

Over the last few years, I’ve found myself more and more gravitating towards electronic books on Kindle, Google Play, and all the academic e-book hosting sites that I use for my research and teaching. E-books are just easier to carry. I can have an entire library right there on my phone for me to choose from when I’m having dinner alone in a restaurant here in Binghamton or when I’m tired of listening to podcasts or reading magazines on a long flight. E-books also make stories more accessible. There’s a now rare novel written by the actor Andrew Robinson about his character Elim Garak from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine called A Stitch in Time that I often see people complaining about how hard to find it is in paperback. Yet I was able to download it in just a few minutes on Google Play and read it cover to cover in a few days. 

Kindle now even has a feature where if you have the book on their app and the recording of it on Audible you can listen to some segments of it when you’re driving and then your location in the e-book will update with your progress in the audiobook. I haven’t used it yet, there’s a biography I’m listening to now about the explorer and scientist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) that I could probably also be reading on the Kindle app on my phone when I have a free minute during office hours or at dinner, but I’m also enjoying just listening to it while driving around the hills here in Broome County, New York.

As an author, at least with the three books I’ve self-published to date (all available on Amazon) I usually prefer people buy the paperback versions because I’ll get more in royalties out of those than out of the e-book copies. Still, as a reader I admit I would often choose the e-book on a given day over the paperback solely for the convenience.

One thought that keeps coming to mind for me returns me to my own childhood and those wonderful mysterious days spent in the small library that my parents collected in our house in Wheaton when I was little. That same library came with us down to Kansas City and consumed our then-unfinished basement. At one point we had probably around 10,000 books in that collection of all sorts and stripes. Today, though I also picture not only my younger self but my own future children, if I’m so lucky, and ask “if I choose to go with e-books over physical ones, will my children have the same experiences I had pulling the odd book from the shelf because it looks interesting and flipping through it?” Those experiences of lounging around just flipping through books as a young child was instrumental in making me who I am today. There are so many stories that I read that way. Even now I sometimes like going into a library just to wander and see what I’ll find. 

On a recent visit to the Bartle Library at my university I had a specific book in mind that I was looking for, Gerald of Wales’s 1188 book the Topography of Ireland, which has been useful for my dissertation. Yet after I found it, I noticed another book next to it that seemed intriguing. It was bound in a blue cover, and called the Annals of Connacht, the westernmost of the four ancient provinces of Ireland, my ancestors’ home province. I pulled it off the shelf and flipped it open, quickly figuring out how to navigate its pages. Soon then, I looked up first my ancestors’ old parish, Burrishoole in County Mayo, and secondly, I looked up my own family name, Ó Catháin, to see what was in there. Both Burrishoole and Ó Catháin had entries, the former was less insightful to me than the latter, for it turned out there was a guy with my exact name who lived in Connacht in the 1520s, another Seán mac Tomás Ó Catháin. Maybe he was an ancestor of mine, it’s possible even though there are big gaps in the records during the height of the colonial period.

I could have stumbled upon that same collection of annals online and have done just that many a time with old books such as the Annals of Connacht, yet it doesn’t have quite the same feeling of accomplishment as finding that book in the flesh, holding it in my hands. I’ve joked that I deal with my primal desire as a human to hunt in two ways: firstly I hunt for food in the grocery store, and secondly I hunt for books in the library. Yeah, I know, it’s pretty corny. And while hunting for books in a library surely wouldn’t compare to hunting for a living animal in a forest, matching your wits against its own, I can say that hunting for books online can be more frustrating than hunting for books in person. When on foot in a library all you really need to worry about is that the library’s catalog system is accurate, when online you also have to figure out how to communicate with the various computer systems that are making your e-book hunt possible. 

Earlier this year when I was searching for import records and ships logs from the French port of Rouen between 1500 and 1567 for my research I found myself dealing with a third layer of complexity: a computer system that can’t actually read the original 500-year old handwritten documents, meaning you just have to hope that whoever imported the document into the system typed enough information into the computer that you can find what you’re looking for. On that one count: the easier legibility of e-books over printed ones, the easier transmission of their stories and information, and the fact that we can now share knowledge around the globe as fast as our data streams will carry that information gives me good reason to prefer e-books. But still, I want my future kids, if I’m so lucky, to have that experience of pulling books from my shelves and wandering through them, discovering that same love of reading that I’ve had all these years.

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The voice of Thomas Jefferson was provided by Michael Ashcraft, voice actor extraordinaire. You can learn more about his work by visiting his website here.

S’Wonderful

Georges Guétary (L) and Gene Kelly (R) singing “S’Wonderful” in 1951’s An American in Paris with Oscar Levant (C) between them.
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S'Wonderful – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I wonder about the word wonder.

Have you ever thought about the words you use to show appreciation for something? Or better yet, have you ever considered what the words you use to show excitement mean? You might say a very modern “cool,” or a more traditional “good,” or a Midwestern “neat,” or a more midcentury “groovy.” There could be a “dude” thrown in there if that’s your style, or you could go even further and offer an “awesome” or a “fantastic,” or Mr. Spock’s own measured “fascinating” into the mix. There’s one such exclamation that bears some consideration, one that is “wonderful” to behold.

What does it mean when something is wonderful? What does it mean to be full of wonder? Growing up I knew the word wonder from the Age of Empires series of computer games where a player could win the game by building a wonder and keeping it standing for 2,000 years in the game’s time (10 minutes in our own reckoning). I always wanted to build wonders in those games but was never quite good enough a player as a child to get to that point. 

There are other uses of the word wonder that come to mind like the German Wunderkind, or Wonder-Child, whose abilities outmatch all others. Or there’s the 2016 Sir Elton John album Wonderful Crazy Night that I got to see him promote and perform on the night when I was in the audience at the Graham Norton Show in London. Wonder is a flexible word because of how lofty an idea it evokes. There are wonderous things out there that are worldly, like the blueberry danishes at McLain’s Bakery in Kansas City, and there are wonders unimaginable to behold like the visions of previously unimaginable beauty seen by the James Webb Space Telescope in recent months.

Yes, I was there.

In the last couple years, I’ve come across the word wonder more and more in my work. It is one of the best English translations of the French word singularité which appears frequently in my primary sources, a word which can be translated as both “individuality [and] uniqueness” as well as a “peculiarity [or an] oddity.” Une singularité is a wonderous thing because it defies expectations. The wonders beheld by the European explorers who arrived on the Atlantic shores of these continents five centuries ago opened their eyes to visions they could not previously have imagined. They became “marvelous possessions” as the literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt described in a landmark study of the First Age of Exploration. 

In my own specialization the 3-toed sloth was a wonder to behold for all these very reasons. It was a mammal that did not seem to provide any usefulness to the humans who lived around it. Nor did it seem to contribute to its own ecosystem by hunting or foraging beyond whatever it could slowly grasp in its own favorite tree. What’s more an especially wonderous claim was made by one of the leading sloth writers of the day, a Frenchman named André Thevet (1506–1590) that claimed because there was no eyewitness evidence of the sloth eating or drinking that had been proven by a European then the animal must be one of only a very small number, if not a true singularité in that it could “live only on air.”

Another place where the word wonder appears is in religion. In Exodus 3 where Moses encounters God at the Burning Bush, God says that when the Pharoah of Egypt does not heed God’s command to let the Hebrews go that God “will stretch out [God’s] hand and strike Egypt” “with wonderous deeds.” (Exodus 3:20 NAB) These same wonders were then performed by Moses and his brother Aaron to assert God’s will that their people should be freed (Exodus 11:10), leading to a transformation in the relationship between the Egyptians and the Hebrews from master and slave to former oppressor and the defiant.

To be wonderous is to be unfathomable, to be terrifying in power and incomprehensibility. The other great nearly religious experience where I’ve heard the word wonder used is in those moments of joy when words fail, and song takes over. I’m of course talking about falling in love, and of that great Gershwin song “S’Wonderful,” which I first heard in the 1951 Gene Kelly film An American in Paris sung by the Pittsburgh native song and dance man himself alongside the French cabaret singer and actor Georges Guétary. It’s one of those songs that I know by heart, having played the film’s album enough times and seen it quite a few at that. One of these days I’ll sing it for myself.

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Homo Sapiens

A particularly bumbling specimen of the species.

Homo Sapiens – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a bit of self-reflection. The Man from Earth website The Man from Earth trailer

On Monday last week, I sat down to watch the 2007 film The Man from Earth for the second time. You may remember hearing or even reading my reflections provoked by that film. I said I’d probably watch the sequel, The Man from Earth: Holocene soon, and well I did just that. Compared to the original, Holocene lacks some of the powerful dialogue, and the gripping storytelling. The Man from Earth felt like it was a story being told in real time, while Holocene, its sequel, seemed more like a TV pilot that was turned into a feature. Both films feature some wonderful actors that I recognize from the many Star Trek series I’ve seen in the last few years, notably John Billingsley and Richard Riehle in the first film, and the great Michael Dorn himself makes a wonderful appearance in the second film.

If I were to draw any deep arguments out of the second film, Holocene, it would be something to do with how we identify ourselves. We humans call ourselves Homo sapiens, a scientific designation that we’ve given to ourselves to distinguish us from our hominid cousins including the Neanderthals. Homo is Latin for human; it is the genus which represents all hominids as a subset of primates. Sapiens on the other hand is more interesting. It is a Latin participle based on the 3rd conjugation verb sapiō, sapere which is used to mean many things from “to taste,” “to have flavor,” to the more innate concept of being able to sense or discern things, all of which is necessary for knowledge. Homo sapiens then means we distinguish ourselves from our hominid cousins by our abilities to understand ideas. Now there’s evidence today that other early humans could think and create in ways that are similar to us, evidence for example that Neanderthals created art of some sort in ancient Europe, so in many ways the fact we designate we humans as Homo sapiens is as much a way of patting ourselves on the back as anything else.

This brings me back to The Man from Earth: Holocene. It’s a film that introduces the core conflict when a group of inquisitive undergrads start to wonder about their professor who they soon realize is the same 14,000-year-old man from the first film. Only now he’s begun to age in slow but noticeable ways. This film made me question the idea that we are Homo sapiens for the personifications of humanity in this film, the four students seeking the truth about their professor, make a series of terrible decisions that prove as book smart as they might be they are clueless to so many other factors of life. Homo sapiens indeed.

In my own research I study the introduction of Brazilian flora and fauna into European natural history through the writings of several French explorers dating to the 1550s through the 1580s. And while I came into my research thinking I would have some fun writing about sloths and parrots and dyewood trees, I have found that the story I’m trying to tell is as much a warning to our present and our future as it is anything mundane about Renaissance natural history. There is a theory, an idea that is introduced late in The Man from Earth: Holocene called the Anthropocene, a concept that is widely discussed today which argues that human interventions and influence upon nature have become so great that we have shifted the course of Earth’s natural development from the Holocene, the current geological epoch defined by our planet’s warming by the Sun over the past 11,650 years, making for the perfect conditions for the development of life as we know it today into a new geological epoch where we humans, the Anthropoi in Greek, are now the prime movers of Earth’s natural course. In the film this becomes an understated note of caution, yet in my own research I find the Anthropocene to be a fundamental piece of the story of the European exploration, conquest, and colonization of the Americas largely ignored until recently.

We call ourselves discerning, we call ourselves wise, and yet we allow our own demands on nature to outstrip what nature can provide. It’s a curious balance we need to maintain, one which I am just as guilty of destabilizing as anyone else. It’s curious to me that we call ourselves wise when we think of all we have done with our home. We are one of maybe only a handful of species (leaving room here for other hominids at least) that has created beautiful art and weapons of mass destruction all with the same innate tool: our brains. We have just as much an ability to love as to fear, and in a given day I think it’s safe to say we act on those emotions without often really realizing it. 

Through it all we’ve survived and thrived on this planet of ours. There are 7.9 billion of us today, and while our population growth is a marvel of our ingenuity and ability to adapt to everything that this planet has had to offer so far, our own exponential growth may be the thing that drives the planet to the point of no longer being able to care for us the way we have been. If we don’t eat, we starve, yet if we eat too much we will run out of food and then starve. As the Man from Earth himself said in the first film, it’s the species that live in balance with nature that survive.

I argue in my dissertation that the Anthropocene really began when two different gene pools of life, one Afro-Eurasian the other American intersected in a large scale for the first time in thousands of years following Columbus’s accidental stumbling on land and people on this side of the Atlantic in 1492. That was the moment when human endeavors began to triumph over natural barriers, when a new global world was first conceived out of the collective products of a series of old worlds on every inhabited continent. It’s fair to call ourselves sapiens, discerning and wise, for the fact that it was humans who bridged that gap through innovation and technology. Yet it’s also fair to say that it was humans too whose innovation and technology created the great climate crisis we find ourselves in now. While the pessimists among us would end the story there, in a way that is in vogue to do these days, I want to continue the story, to contribute a verse to the poetry of life and say to you here and now today that it will be our innovation and technology, our discerning and wise nature that will figure out a way out of this crisis and that will lead us to adapt again to a new life in this new world we’ve created in our own image.

The Man from Earth speaks to me of the potential of humanity and of how at the end of the day we’re still just telling each other the same sorts of stories around a campfire. Like our ancient ancestors before us we see what we know and imagine what could be out there beyond the light of our knowledge. Unlike our ancestors we today are comfortable in a world we’ve created for ourselves, or at least some among us are comfortable in that world. We don’t need to innovate quite so greatly as past generations; we can let our minds become lazy and unimaginative. Like the big wigs from every time just before a storm we can be content and let the tides overcome us, but some among us will be hit more fiercely by those tides than others, and they’ll be the ones to stand up and say we can do better for ourselves. We will always stumble and fall, like those four characters from The Man from Earth: Holocene but we will always find a way of getting back up.

At the end of the day, we’ve created this new world where we are at its center, the keystone species around which all others exist in a new balance. I personally find that balance more precarious than I’d like, and personally I’d rather not be the one holding the entire balance of nature up like some modern Atlas. Yet over generations of decisions for good or ill this is what we’ve decided to do, and who we’ve decided to become. All we can do now is live up to the task and make the burden less strenuous for our descendants.

Fiction

Fiction – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I want to explain how fiction is necessary for my survival.

I am in the business of writing serious, analytical, and factual accounts about the human experience. As a historian, that’s my job. I do write fiction as well, though I keep both as separate as the church and state are supposed to be in this country. Still, as much as I enjoy my work, as much as I like the feeling of getting my academic writings on paper and presenting them at conferences, when I’m looking for some fun reading, I usually turn to fiction. Fiction is fundamental to the human spirit, it allows us to dream, to imagine alternate possibilities, to envision possible futures.

At any given moment I’m usually reading 2 or 3 books for fun, normally there’s at least one sci-fi novel, maybe a memoir, and possibly something relating to natural history. I admit, 2 out of 3 of those are nonfiction, depending on how you understand the truth of that memoir, but if I had to choose between those three genres when I’m sitting alone in a restaurant at lunch or dinner or looking for something to read before bed, I’ll go for the fiction ahead of the others. I also tend to disagree with the trend of late that prefers dystopian fiction over anything else. There are so many of those stories out there, from the Ender’s Game books by Orson Scott Card, to the Blade Runner and Mad Max films, to even my old favorite Douglas Adams’s A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I don’t like dystopia, and I don’t honestly understand how it could be enjoyable to read or watch a story talking about such a future. 

Rather, I prefer the opposite, utopian fiction, stories that offer us a vision of what our future could be like. I think that’s why I’ve been drawn to Star Trek since the pandemic began, and have now watched several of the TV series, a few of the films, and even read some of the accompanying novels. There’s something about a vision of humanity’s future as a contributing member of an interstellar community that really seems heartening to me, that as distant as that potential future seems now, we might well reach it someday. This is one area where my work and my favorite stories intersect; my historical research deals squarely with exploration, in my case mostly set in Brazil in the 1550s. In many respects, my research is a cautionary story of all the horrible things that the explorers fanning out from Europe did to the peoples they encountered. Normally, academic history books aren’t read by many people, and certainly there are only a few that get much public attention. So, I hope that if anyone eventually reads my work, they’ll recognize in it my efforts at warning our own generations and generations to come of the rocks and shoals that threaten any present or future explorer who seeks to venture out without harming others in the process.

So yes, my love of fiction does influence my work, but only indirectly. When it comes to my writing, when I need to refresh and rethink my work, I’ll turn to those same novels and bask in their eloquence and style. As a writer, as a dreamer, as an optimist, fiction is necessary to my survival.