Introducing... Nothing very interesting

Bonjour mes amis! Je m’appelle Rachael! No, scratch that, I am not French and my accent is terrible.

Nonetheless, to get started I am Rachael, and the wonderful Ryon has done me the honour of asking me to write the Saturday posts for the blog. So, that is what I shall do, unless I am incredibly boring (which I suspect I might be) in which case I promise I’ll stop!

But without further ado- on! To the weeks challenge!

Now, a disclaimer, I have never read TFIOS nor seen the film, so I am not in a position to give you any well thought out advice on the matter. However, I am fortuitous in the fact that this week’s challenge is to write about what I find positive- as my personal favourite subject is ancient history, and I am hoping to relate most of my posts to the topic- then I feel I am accurate in saying that classical history is what I feel positive about.

With the muddle of essays and presentations I have to prepare over the next few weeks- stressed is an appropriate word to how I am currently feeling. That’s not to say I’m too overwhelmed- or struggling to cope- because I have managed to set an order to my work and organised myself- but that doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally look at my multitude of tasks and ask myself why I picked a degree that makes me want to throw an amphora out a window.

It boils down to this quote.

‘We are standing on the edge of a hole in time’

I found it at a museum in Brussels nearly a year ago now, but throughout that time it has remained with me. This quote, for me at least, exemplifies everything I love about history, and the fact I can’t understand why everyone doesn’t love it. Every step we take has been walked down be people before, and every brick we touch has been touched by someone else. We are not original or unique- because there have been 2 millennia of human history and every feeling we have has been felt by someone before. I find this comforting, because regardless of how I feel right now, how stressed and upset I can get- we are not alone- and it’s ignorant to believe we are unique in our thoughts and emotions. It’s easy to put ancient cultures on a pedestal, or drag them down and call them uncivilised, but we often forget the people behind the actions when we do so. Constantine’s sons’ may have acted oddly to us, but they were people nonetheless, with thoughts, emotions and real lives. As steeped in myth as our history is- everyone in it was the product of their society. Maybe their values were different- so do we have the right to judge them? Perhaps we would have acted the same if we had been raised with the same morals. When a roman emperor starts a civil war, can you blame his sons from disturbing the peace to do the same?

History isn’t just about those figures though. It goes further than that, and deeper. If you care about Octavian, then you also care about his wife, mother, slaves and their children. Because these are the people who shared his life. Graffiti in Pompeii is just as vulgar as our own- though ideals change- and no matter how stressful it is writing about the socio-political struggles of early dynastic Egypt, whenever I sit down to learn about hoplites or Theodora, I smile, and the stress seems worth it.

This piece works as propaganda for history. I don’t mean to bore you and I feel I may have gone a tad off topic- but history is what is positive for me, which is why I intend to give each of my posts a classical spin. It’s a comfort blanket to wrap myself in, a warm cup of tea to nourish the soul.

More accurately, history is a hole in time, and to experience it, all you have to do is jump in.