Despite what your experiences may have taught you, holidays aren't merely occasions to eat enough food and/or candy to put your body into a recuperative coma. They also aren't there just so Aunt Bessie can drink enough chardonnay to feel comfortable airing all of her grievances regarding Uncle Cooter and that harlot who works at the health clinic. We probably won't ever really know the reason our ancestors adopted the custom of these periodic celebrations or why certain ones have persisted over time, but we can make a pretty good guess. The holidays that are the most entrenched in pretty much every culture are time markers, moments of pause and reflection usually tied to some annual natural transition like the harvest or a solstice. They're there because we need them to be. We need them because the concept of time is legitimately terrifying.
Think about it. There are the obvious ways that time makes us uncomfortable. Noting how its passage prods the universe's propensity towards impermanence reminds us that we, too, are transient fixtures. And observing its impossible immensity pushes us towards the recognition that, in the grand scheme, the totality of our experience is beyond miniscule. Like
Louis CK says, we're all going to be dead for WAY longer than we were alive. We're really just dead people who haven't died yet. And that's an unsettling enough proposition that thousands of years of humans have concocted all sorts of ways to deal with it.
But an even more unnerving realization undergirds how time disturbs us: WE DON'T UNDERSTAND IT AT ALL. To the extent that we think we've been able to make up math equations to explain the universe (a ridiculous process that we call "physics"), there's a pretty good chance that time doesn't behave at all like we think it does. The fact that we experience time as linear might just be our feeble brains' way of organizing and understanding an experience that is way more confusing than we generally let on. In a lot of ways, this struggle to arrange and comprehend time is humanity's chief battle. In other words, if existence is a war, time is our greatest  enemy.
[caption id="attachment_146332" align="alignnone" width="500"]
Did somebody say Time War?[/caption]
Holidays are vital and complex weapons in that war. They serve as landmarks to help us organize time and remember our experiences moving through it. Absent of a calendar, holidays are the best method we have for marking time's passage. I don't remember the exact day or even exactly how old I was that time I thought I broke my back playing tackle football in the snow with my friends, but I know that it was around Halloween because that was the weird year that it snowed on Halloween. You might not be able to call up the exact year that Cousin Ethel wrassled her grown son to the floor and whipped his behind for being a smart aleck, but you remember that it happened at the annual Christmas Eve dinner at Meemaw and Peepaw's.
And that's what makes holidays such effective tools in our eternal battle against time. Not only do they mark its passage, but they are also the closest we can get to a refuge from it. We're comforted by the practice of keeping holidays and maintaining the traditions associated with them because doing so provides the illusion that we're lifting ourselves out of the rushing stream of time for a few moments each year. William Faulkner famously said that in the South, the past is never dead; it isn't even past. When we celebrate holidays, we get as close to making that literally true as we possibly can. Taking your kids trick-or-treating or cooking Granny's stuffing recipe at Thanksgiving connects you with your past in a way that makes time feel less fleeting and more circular than it does on a daily basis. Holidays don't just mark time, they provide a momentary victory over it, a window through which we can try to squeeze some continuity between the people who came before us and the ones who will come after.
As people living in the United States during the second decade of the twenty-first century, we have a lot to be thankful for. Measured by average level of physical exertion and daily personal risk, our lives are exponentially easier than those of people who lived a hundred years ago. Very few of us have to worry about having our limbs ripped off by the exposed belts and gears of the machines we interact with at work. Even fewer leave the house each morning wondering if we'll be eaten by a bear at some point in the day. Also, Jennifer Lawrence.
[caption id="attachment_146333" align="alignnone" width="500"]
New KSR drinking game: take a shot every time a Funkhouser blogger mentions JLaw[/caption]
But if you were to ask me what one thing about modern life I'm most thankful for, I would probably give you an answer that had something to do with how well the transmission of popular culture during the past fifty years or so has transcended time. I've
written about how I think the rapid advancement of recording (and replaying) technology has fundamentally altered the conveyance of culture, but on the day before Thanksgiving, there's something more to be said about the implications of that transformation. The popular music that I have access to through vinyl albums, CDs, and mp3s, the movies I can watch on VHS, DVD, or streaming on my computer, the television programming that I can dig up on YouTube -- down to the previously relatively ephemeral commercials and obscure short-lived cartoons -- are all momentary victories over time.
I might go as far as to say that the present form of the internet is the greatest weapon humans have ever invented to defeat time. Not only does it destroy space by creating a digital plane in which information can move at ridiculous speeds, but it freezes moments in time, allowing us to replay them over and over again. Just think -- barring some catastrophic political and economic collapse -- people living a hundred years from now will be able to pull up the video of Miley Cyrus gyrating against Jason Seaver, PhD, Jr. and watch it any time they want. While that might not seem like a victory to you, the inescapable fact is that it is a victory. Someday, Miley will die. But Miley's Tongue is immortal. And to me, that's as good a cause as any for celebration. It's definitely a heck of a reason to give thanks.
Despite what your experiences may have taught you, holidays aren't merely occasions to eat enough food and/or candy to put your body into a recuperative coma. They also aren't there just so Aunt Bessie can drink enough chardonnay to feel comfortable airing all of her grievances regarding Uncle Cooter and that harlot who works at the health clinic. We probably won't ever really know the reason our ancestors adopted the custom of these periodic celebrations or why certain ones have persisted over time, but we can make a pretty good guess. The holidays that are the most entrenched in pretty much every culture are time markers, moments of pause and reflection usually tied to some annual natural transition like the harvest or a solstice. They're there because we need them to be. We need them because the concept of time is legitimately terrifying.
Think about it. There are the obvious ways that time makes us uncomfortable. Noting how its passage prods the universe's propensity towards impermanence reminds us that we, too, are transient fixtures. And observing its impossible immensity pushes us towards the recognition that, in the grand scheme, the totality of our experience is beyond miniscule. Like Louis CK says, we're all going to be dead for WAY longer than we were alive. We're really just dead people who haven't died yet. And that's an unsettling enough proposition that thousands of years of humans have concocted all sorts of ways to deal with it.
But an even more unnerving realization undergirds how time disturbs us: WE DON'T UNDERSTAND IT AT ALL. To the extent that we think we've been able to make up math equations to explain the universe (a ridiculous process that we call "physics"), there's a pretty good chance that time doesn't behave at all like we think it does. The fact that we experience time as linear might just be our feeble brains' way of organizing and understanding an experience that is way more confusing than we generally let on. In a lot of ways, this struggle to arrange and comprehend time is humanity's chief battle. In other words, if existence is a war, time is our greatest  enemy.
[caption id="attachment_146332" align="alignnone" width="500"]
Did somebody say Time War?[/caption]
Holidays are vital and complex weapons in that war. They serve as landmarks to help us organize time and remember our experiences moving through it. Absent of a calendar, holidays are the best method we have for marking time's passage. I don't remember the exact day or even exactly how old I was that time I thought I broke my back playing tackle football in the snow with my friends, but I know that it was around Halloween because that was the weird year that it snowed on Halloween. You might not be able to call up the exact year that Cousin Ethel wrassled her grown son to the floor and whipped his behind for being a smart aleck, but you remember that it happened at the annual Christmas Eve dinner at Meemaw and Peepaw's.
And that's what makes holidays such effective tools in our eternal battle against time. Not only do they mark its passage, but they are also the closest we can get to a refuge from it. We're comforted by the practice of keeping holidays and maintaining the traditions associated with them because doing so provides the illusion that we're lifting ourselves out of the rushing stream of time for a few moments each year. William Faulkner famously said that in the South, the past is never dead; it isn't even past. When we celebrate holidays, we get as close to making that literally true as we possibly can. Taking your kids trick-or-treating or cooking Granny's stuffing recipe at Thanksgiving connects you with your past in a way that makes time feel less fleeting and more circular than it does on a daily basis. Holidays don't just mark time, they provide a momentary victory over it, a window through which we can try to squeeze some continuity between the people who came before us and the ones who will come after.
As people living in the United States during the second decade of the twenty-first century, we have a lot to be thankful for. Measured by average level of physical exertion and daily personal risk, our lives are exponentially easier than those of people who lived a hundred years ago. Very few of us have to worry about having our limbs ripped off by the exposed belts and gears of the machines we interact with at work. Even fewer leave the house each morning wondering if we'll be eaten by a bear at some point in the day. Also, Jennifer Lawrence.
[caption id="attachment_146333" align="alignnone" width="500"]
New KSR drinking game: take a shot every time a Funkhouser blogger mentions JLaw[/caption]
But if you were to ask me what one thing about modern life I'm most thankful for, I would probably give you an answer that had something to do with how well the transmission of popular culture during the past fifty years or so has transcended time. I've written about how I think the rapid advancement of recording (and replaying) technology has fundamentally altered the conveyance of culture, but on the day before Thanksgiving, there's something more to be said about the implications of that transformation. The popular music that I have access to through vinyl albums, CDs, and mp3s, the movies I can watch on VHS, DVD, or streaming on my computer, the television programming that I can dig up on YouTube -- down to the previously relatively ephemeral commercials and obscure short-lived cartoons -- are all momentary victories over time.
I might go as far as to say that the present form of the internet is the greatest weapon humans have ever invented to defeat time. Not only does it destroy space by creating a digital plane in which information can move at ridiculous speeds, but it freezes moments in time, allowing us to replay them over and over again. Just think -- barring some catastrophic political and economic collapse -- people living a hundred years from now will be able to pull up the video of Miley Cyrus gyrating against Jason Seaver, PhD, Jr. and watch it any time they want. While that might not seem like a victory to you, the inescapable fact is that it is a victory. Someday, Miley will die. But Miley's Tongue is immortal. And to me, that's as good a cause as any for celebration. It's definitely a heck of a reason to give thanks.
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