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I don't feel enlightened


  I admit I had a suspicion that I would complete and read over my master timeline and say "aaaaah."

But the timeline is complete (see yesterday's posting) and what I feel now is mostly a sense of relief. 

No Big Zig-Zagging dialectic suggests itself, no from-status-to-contract big picture. No world cycle. No "aaaaaah." 

So is life just one damned thing after another? Maybe I should make up a timeline of the efforts to answer THAT question. 

For now I will just note a couple of obvious features of the Big Timeline:

Events crowd together because of presentism. Early in the timeline, I skipped past millions of years from one post to the next -- then it was just thousands of years, then an approximately one-post-per-century pace. Finally it was a year-to-year listing. Of course I have several recent month-by -month timelines for recent years on this blog, but I decided not to include those.

The impression conveyed by a sufficiently detached alien reading yesterday's post might be of a planet where events worth commemoration were once very rare events but over time have become quite common events by stages.    

Another obvious feature (just a consequence of my idiosyncrasies perhaps): it suggests that there are genuine relationships of cause and effect in history, though they often surprising sideways things. Our need for vitamin C proved evolutionarily important; the ancient flood that severed Britain from Europe has proven of tremendous significance; two world wars in the first half of the last century shocked the world into an unprecedented degree of international organization. 

LATER ADD:

That is all for now. Actually, I am beginning to get a Big Picture Idea, but I will save it for now.   

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