Michael Schmicker's Blog - Posts Tagged "jim-tucker"
Past Life, Anyone?
Past life, anyone?
I recently finished Dr. Jim Tucker’s fascinating book "Return to Life" – an examination of children’s past life memories (or confabulations, if you’re a die-hard skeptic). Next to Dr. Ian Stevenson’s pioneering reincarnation case studies, it’s the best I’ve read on the topic.
It got me thinking.
I’m a member of the Goodreads Historical Fictionistas group. We share a love of historical fiction, and I noticed many gravitate towards books set in a specific era (e.g. medieval, or Renaissance, or 19th century). I posted the following question to them:
If you had a chance to live life in another century, which one would YOU choose to live in, where, why?
I’d live in the late Victorian age.
I’ve read almost all of Dickens’ books, and thrilled to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. I’ve also devoured most of H.G. Wells (The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, etc.). The intellectual, political and technological ferment of that era is so heady – Darwin, Marx, suffragism, steam trains and telegraphs and a flood of mechanical inventions that transformed our world; the looming collapse of a haughty but doomed aristocratic social structure, and the grinding poverty which accompanied industrialization and led to World War I and the birth of the modern era. Its appeal never seems to die. I’m not surprised Steampunk resonates with young people. Life is more colorful, emotional, the highs higher and the lows lower, than today’s more boring, homogenized, global consumer society.
My life in that era?
I’m a man, of course (a woman’s life would be too confining), and I’m not too poor; maybe a minor member of Parliament, with a flat in Mayfair, a country house in Kent and membership in the Arts Club where I dine with my friends Dickens and Kipling as they discuss the British Raj in India and how to handle a pushy, upstart America; debate poor house laws and women’s emancipation; wonder over Rontgen’s discovery of x-rays; and shake their heads at the French Impressionists. Hard for me to imagine a more interesting historical time and place to live in!
And you? When and where would you live?
I recently finished Dr. Jim Tucker’s fascinating book "Return to Life" – an examination of children’s past life memories (or confabulations, if you’re a die-hard skeptic). Next to Dr. Ian Stevenson’s pioneering reincarnation case studies, it’s the best I’ve read on the topic.
It got me thinking.
I’m a member of the Goodreads Historical Fictionistas group. We share a love of historical fiction, and I noticed many gravitate towards books set in a specific era (e.g. medieval, or Renaissance, or 19th century). I posted the following question to them:
If you had a chance to live life in another century, which one would YOU choose to live in, where, why?
I’d live in the late Victorian age.
I’ve read almost all of Dickens’ books, and thrilled to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. I’ve also devoured most of H.G. Wells (The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, etc.). The intellectual, political and technological ferment of that era is so heady – Darwin, Marx, suffragism, steam trains and telegraphs and a flood of mechanical inventions that transformed our world; the looming collapse of a haughty but doomed aristocratic social structure, and the grinding poverty which accompanied industrialization and led to World War I and the birth of the modern era. Its appeal never seems to die. I’m not surprised Steampunk resonates with young people. Life is more colorful, emotional, the highs higher and the lows lower, than today’s more boring, homogenized, global consumer society.
My life in that era?
I’m a man, of course (a woman’s life would be too confining), and I’m not too poor; maybe a minor member of Parliament, with a flat in Mayfair, a country house in Kent and membership in the Arts Club where I dine with my friends Dickens and Kipling as they discuss the British Raj in India and how to handle a pushy, upstart America; debate poor house laws and women’s emancipation; wonder over Rontgen’s discovery of x-rays; and shake their heads at the French Impressionists. Hard for me to imagine a more interesting historical time and place to live in!
And you? When and where would you live?
