The Windup-Bee

For the record, if I don’t make it out of here, don’t put me down for mummification

here are some quotes from my teachers (Ancient Greek and Mesopotamian studies), collected over the last two years, to convince you otherwise:

“Greek. It’s not Latin.”

“It’s a big book and I don’t recommend that you drop it on your foot, like I did a moment ago.”

“Why do you assume what I say has to make sense?”

“Maybe in the third millennium BC, a Peloponnesian left for Crete thinking ‘now I’ll finally be rid of my cousin!’… Humanity never changes.”

“[Teacher] didn’t talk to you about leg-shaving? I’m disappointed.”

“When you want to be sure your friends are loyal to you, you obviously ask for hostages, don’t you?”

“French is too hard. Sumerian is much easier.”

“I’m only going to discuss our future activities, because the past is pointless.” *students start laughing* “Well, obviously not when it’s ancient history.” *more students laughing* “Come on, that’s not what I meant!”

“I hope you enjoyed the class. Next week we’ll talk about violence, murder and infanticide.”

“It’s crazy, especially when you remember this was built in the 15th century BC. Long live the Hittites!!!” *bounces up and down excitedly, then pauses* “Yeah, so, you’ll have figured out by now that I’m not at all objective.”

Teacher: “There’s a lot of people missing this morning.” Student: “Maybe there was a problem with the tram.” Teacher: “Or maybe there’s a crocodile wandering around town.”

“You see that little object? No, it’s not a dildo.”

“So Protogonos, the penis king… Yes. I know. You can stop laughing now.”

“I’m glad we’ve stopped sacrificing donkeys, because they’re lovely animals.”

“Here’s a list of Cilician kings. My favourite, as some of you know, is Tarcondimotus. If you’re looking for an original name for your child, I recommend it.”

“You’re all studying Sumerian? That’s great! So you know what gír means?” *silence* “You’re all useless.”

“Like Batman, Xenophon is about to save the day.”

Teacher: “According to the Derveni Papyrus, the sun is a penis.” Student: “That gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘sunrise’.”

“Doors are serious business. I organised a colloquium on doors, you know.”

“Does anybody here know Sanskrit? No? Good, then I can say all the nonsense I want.”

Teacher: “See that phallic thing? What do you think it is?” Student: “… A phallus?” Teacher: “Fooled you! It’s an Ottoman tombstone.”

“Every archeologist thinks their site is the most important. Of course, they’re wrong because it’s obviously mine.”

*teacher’s pen runs out of ink* “I’m telling you, it’s the Third World in this university.”

*on a class trip, after losing several students at the site of Aristotle’s birthplace* “The first thing we need to ask ourselves is: what would Aristotle do?”

“[Teacher] wrote an article about that. I never understood it.”

*student attempts to translate ‘the bird eats something’ into Sumerian* “You just said ‘the bird eats someone’. That’s definitely possible, but I wouldn’t want to meet that bird.”

“But more importantly, can the word ‘apotropaic’ be applied to mosquito repellent?”

*on a class trip, after someone sicked up in the train* “Yayyy! Time to play in the vomit!”

This is the generation that came of age during WWI and the 1918 flu pandemic. They witnessed their world collapse in the first war that spread around the globe, and they -- in retrospect, optimistically -- called it the "war to end all wars". And that war was a quagmire. The trenches on the Western Front were notoriously awful, unsanitary and cold and wet and teeming with sickness, and bloody battles were fought to gain or lose a few feet of territory, and all because a series of alliances caused one assassination in one unstable area to spiral into a brutal large-scale war fought on the ground by people who mostly had no personal stake in the outcomes and gained nothing from winning.

On some of the worst-hit battlefields, the land is still too toxic for plant growth.

And on the heels of this horrific war, a pandemic struck. It's often referred to as "the Spanish flu" because Spain was neutral in the war, and so was the first country to admit that their people were dropping like flies. By the time the warring countries were willing to face the disease, it was far too late to contain it.

Anywhere from 50 to 100 million people worldwide would die from it. 675,000 were in the US.

But once it was finally contained -- anywhere from a year to a year and a half later -- the 20s had begun, and they began roaring.

Hedonism abounded. Alcohol flowed like water in spite of Prohibition. Music and dance and art fluorished. It was the age of Dadaism, an artistic movement of surrealism, absurdism, and abstraction. Women's skirts rose and haircuts shortened in a flamboyant rejection of the social norms of the previous decades. It was a time of glitter and glamour and jazz and flash, and (save for the art that was made) it was mostly skin deep.

Everyone stumbled out of the war and pandemic desperate to forget the horrific things they'd seen and done and all that they'd lost, and lost for nothing.

Reality seemed so pointless. It's not a coincidence that the two codifiers of the fantasy genre -- J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis -- both fought in WWI. In fact, they were school friends before the war, and were the only two of their group to return home. Tolkein wanted to rewrite the history of Europe, while Lewis wanted to rebuild faith in the escape from the world.

(There's a reason Frodo goes into the West: physically, he returned to the Shire, but mentally, he never came back from Mordor, and he couldn't live his whole life there. There's a reason three of the Pevensies can never let go of Narnia: in Narnia, unlike reality, the things they did and fought for and believed in actually mattered, were actually worth the price they paid.)

It's also no coincidence that many of the famous artists of the time either killed themselves outright or let their vices do them in. The 20s roared both in spite of and because of the despair of the Lost Generation.

It was also the era of the Harlem Renaissance, which came to the feelings of alienation and disillusionment from a different direction: there was a large migration of Black people from the South, many of whom moved to the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Obviously, the sense of alienation wasn't new to Black people in America, but the cultural shift allowed for them to publicly express it in the arts and literature in ways that hadn't been open to them before.

There was also horrific -- and state-sanctioned -- violence perpetrated against Black communities in this time, furthering the anger and despair and sense that society had not only failed them but had never even given them a chance. The term at the time was shell-shock, but now we know it as PTSD, and the vast majority of the people who came of age between 1910 and 1920 suffered from it, from one source or another.

It was an entire generation of trauma, and then the stock market crashed in 1929. Helpless, angry, impotent in the face of all that had seemingly destroyed the world for them, on the verge of utter despair, it was also a generation vulnerable to despotism. In the wake of all this chaos -- god, please, someone just take control of all this mess and set it right.

Sometimes the person who took over was decent and played by the rules and at least attempted to do the right thing. Other times, they were self-serving and hateful and committed to subjugating anyone who didn't fit their mold.

There are a lot of parallels to now, but we have something they didn't, and that's the fact that they did it first.

We know what their mistakes and sins were. We have the gift of history to see the whole picture and what worked and what failed. We as a species have walked this road before, and we weren't any happier or stronger or smarter about it the first time.

I think I want to reiterate that point: the Lost Generation were no stronger or weaker than Millennials and Gen Z are today. Plenty of both have risen up and fought back, and plenty have stumbled and been crushed under the weight. Plenty have been horribly abused by the people who were supposed to lead them, and plenty have done the abusing. Plenty of great art has been made by both, and plenty of it is escapist fantasy or scathing criticism or inspiring optimism or despairing pessimism.

We find humor in much the same things, because when reality is a mess, both the absurd and the self-deprecating become hilarious in comparison. There's a reason modern audiences don't find Seinfeld as funny as Gen X does, and many older audiences find modern comedy impenetrable and baffling -- they're different kinds of humor from different realities.

I think my point accumulates into this: in spite of how awful and hopeless and pointless everything feels, we do have a guide. We've been through this before, as a culture, and even though all of them are gone now, we have their words and art and memory to help us. We know now what they didn't then: there is a future.

The path forward is a hard one, and the only thing that makes it easier is human connection. Art -- in the most base sense, anything that is an expression of emotion and thought into a medium that allows it to be shared -- is the best and most enduring vehicle for that connection, to reach not just loved ones but people a thousand miles or a hundred years away.

So don't bottle it up. Don't pretend to be okay when you're not. Paint it, sculpt it, write it, play it, sing it, scream it, hell, you can even meme it out into the void. Whatever it takes to reach someone else -- not just for yourself but for others, both present and future.