Cayce & Bigend talk about History and the Future

Quote from Pattern Recogniton – Chapter 6: The Match Factory:

“Of course,” he [Bigend] says, “we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be.  In that sense, we have no future.  Not in the sense that our grandparnts had a future, or thought they did.  Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration.  For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on.  We have no future because our present is too volatile” .. “We have only risk management.  The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios.  Pattern Recognition.”

..”Do we have a past, then?”  Stonestreet asks.

“History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when, ” Bigend says, his eyes narrowing.  “Who did what to whom.  With what.  Who won.  Who lost.  Who mutated.  Who became extinct.”

“The future is there,” Cayce hears herself say, “looking back at us.  Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.  And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.” .. “I only know that the one constant in history is change:  The past changes.  Our version of the past will interest the future to about the extent we’re interested in whatever past the Victorians believed in.  It simply won’t seem very relevant”

67 thoughts on “Cayce & Bigend talk about History and the Future

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