Great Books Ep 113. Herodotus - The History - Book 4 (Melpomene). Birds and Thoughts
Being able to have time to think freely is the best gift that a person can have.
“Unless, Persians, ye can turn into birds and fly up into the sky. or become mice and burrow under the ground, or make yourselves frogs, and take refuge in the fens, ye will never make escape from this land, but die pierced by our arrows.”
~ ‘The History’ (Book 3) by Herodotus (George Rawlinson transl. GB6 - p. 147)
In one of the dramatic scenes of the book, the Scythians send a gift to Darius of Persia, who is attacking them. The gift includes - a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows. Darius, who is at his wits’ end by the non-traditional fighting of the nomadic people, interprets this as the Scythians yielding everything they have - the mouse (earth), the frog (water), the bird (air), and arrows (military). But Gobryas, one of his generals and one of the seven who with Darius had overthrown Smerdis the Magus, says it means the opposite. He says the quote above: unless the Persians can turn into birds and fly into the sky, they will die, pierced by Scythian arrows.
The mention of a bird made me think about dinosaurs, freedom to fly and thought.
1. Dinosaurs
Aren’t birds the direct descendants of dinosaurs? Something that always amazes me when I think about dinosaurs is that they lived and thrived on Earth for over 165 million years. That is so long. Humans (Homo sapiens) have been around for less than half a million years. All the civilizations we know of have existed in the last 5000 years or so. It is such a tiny window of time - so small to be a rounding error. Unless something cataclysmic happens, most living things don’t even leave fossils behind, I guess. Everything gets erased with time. If all the people on Earth perish in the next 10,000 years, say by a large meteor or a virus, and if birds evolve back into large dinosaurs, and if they live for millions of years, who would know that all this existed? I sometimes feel that the probability that civilizations existed on Earth might be higher than the probability of finding life among the stars at the moment. Millions of star systems, millions of miles away, and in the cosmic timescale, they might be millions of years ahead or behind us. Civilizations on different worlds might be like flickers on the large dark cosmic sea of nothingness, shining and vanishing before anyone can see. But how much can we do to extend this spark? Dinosaurs lived for over 150 million years, and they didn’t invent reading, writing, thinking or the ability to go beyond the Earth. They were limited by their brain capacity, I guess. As humans, though we think we are unlimited, are we really? A million years is a long time, even the next 10,000 years seems like such a long time. In the cosmic scale, there is probably a limit to what we can actually accomplish. The only way to transcend the human body’s limitations seems to be machines or putting machines in the body - to become ‘Homo Deus’, as Harari calls it. But even that probably has a limitation.
2. Birds
I also saw the last episode of Task last week, and it ends with a series of shots of birds. A beautiful, poetic ending that remains etched in your mind long after watching.
In the final scene of “Task,” Tom (Mark Ruffalo) hears the sound of birds outside his window, sending him into a moment of quiet contemplation before a cut to the end credits, which is also footage of birds. That the emotional finale’s end credits forgo a big musical moment, in favor of the quiet ambient sound of birds in nature, underscores just how ingrained the animal had become with the themes, characters, and filmmaking of “Task.”
Chris O’Falt - Understanding the Birds of ‘Task’ — and How They Became the Final Image of the Series
And as luck would have it, Bill Davidson’s birdwatching article came up on my feed on Substack. An inspiring post with great pictures.
At its core, birdwatching is about focusing less on ourselves and more on the wider world that surrounds us. Training our attention on nature allows us to approach the end goal of birdwatching, which is to be fully present in each moment and to appreciate the birds as they are—to close the distance between you and the bird so that you experience the reality of two lives becoming one.
Bill Davidson - “Birdwatching Is Having a Moment - And We Need to Talk About It”
When we look at birds, we feel the need to be free. To fly freely and look down upon everyone. Birds have a vantage point that none of the animals on the ground have. I guess for this reason, humans have always been fascinated by flying - Icarus’ wings, Ravana’s pushpaka vimana, the flying carpet in 1001 Arabian Nights, etc.
3. Thoughts
A bird is a metaphor for thought itself: weightless, flying, untethered. The fact that a normal person like me can sit at a table or lie down on a sofa and let my thoughts wander to the stars, to the ends of the universe, means so many things - that I’m in a safe place in peaceful circumstances, that anybody can think beyond their surroundings, that people in so many places across centuries, didn’t have the freedom to think or express whatever they were thinking. Being able to have time to think freely is the best gift that a person can have.
Aren’t most living things that we know bound to the basics of survival? To food and shelter? So religious zealots or authoritarian leaders who curtail people’s freedom of expression or warmongers who destroy peace in a place are reducing people to survival mode and not giving them time and space to think deeply. I also wonder if all the thoughts that we think have already been thought through. We might credit a particular line of thought to famous people like Plato, Socrates, Nietzsche, Hegel, etc. But all those ideas might have been thought through by other people who existed way before them and not written down or passed down. It is also true that ideas are cumulative, that prior ones give rise to new ones, that we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, and specific circumstances make people think in certain ways. But I also do believe people can come up with new thoughts even without older ones.
Well, I’ll end with the thought that I’m optimistic the future is brighter, that we will have fewer wars and conflicts, and that we might have more time to think. A bird has wings; we have our minds. Both can take flight to move beyond the here and now.