Status Updates From The Years of Rice and Salt

“Here are our conquerors, a culture where women have power! I wonder if we could judge civilizations by how well women have done in them.”

Still, it brought home to them yet again how insane their opponents were. Ignorant fanatical disciples of a cruel desert cult, promised eternity in a paradise where sexual orgasm with beautiful houris lasted ten thousand years, no surprise they were so often suicidally brave, happy to die, reckless in frenzied opiated ways that were hard to counter.

“Survived them, and the Six Great Errors, and the Three Incredible Fuckups, and the Nine Greatest Incidents of Bad Luck. A miracle! There must be hungry ghosts holding big umbrellas over us, brothers.”

One of the Japanese men snorted. “No one can take over the world,” he said. “It's too big.”

It's becoming clear to me that the island England was a sort of Japan-about-to-happen, on the other side of the world.

...the Buddhist monasteries here were already centers of metalworking and mechanics, and ceramics. The local mathematicians brought calculation to full flower for use in navigation, gunnery, and mechanics.

History as a story worth telling will only begin when the whole lives outnumber the wasted ones. That means we have many generations to go before history begins. All the inequalities must end; all the surplus wealth must be equitably distributed. Until then we are still only some kind of gibbering monkey, and humanity, as we usually like to think of it, does not yet exist.

To a very great extent human history has been the story of the unequal accumulation of harvested wealth, shifting from one center of power to another...

“No. But we live in barbarous times. Buddhism spreads by people converting out of their own wish for peace and right action. But power condenses around those willing to use force. Islam will use force, the emperor will use force. They will rule the world. Or fight over it, until it is all destroyed.”

“Immoral?”
“Dancing and suchlike. Rhythmic motion during prayers—even the praying aloud.”
“It sounds fairly ordinary to me. Celebrations are celebrations, after all.”

“all the life stages”: milk teeth, hair-pinned-up, marriage, children, rice and salt, widowhood.

“When my days of rice and salt are over,” she would say, “I'll copy out the sutras and pray all day. But until then we had all better get to the day's work!”

Every dynasty begins well, cleansing the decay of the fallen one before it. But then their turn for corruption comes.

This is what the human story is, not the emperors and the generals and their wars, but the nameless actions of people who are never written down, the good they do for others passed on like a blessing, just doing for strangers what your mother did for you, or not doing what she always spoke against. And all that carries forward and makes us what we are.

“You have had other lives?”
“We all have. Don't you remember?”