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Deep and crisp and even.
Feb. 4th, 2009 09:52 amBut that's enough about my lovemaking technique.
There was a programme on the telly the other night about past lives - it was Tony Robinson and the Medieval Reincarnation if you're interested, and it was all about people who had been hypnotised to believe they were Cathars in a previous life. David's first rule of past lives is that the importance and interest of person you were in a previous life is inversely proportional to how interesting you are in this one, and the programme came to much the same conclusion - these former Cathars tended to be lonely fruitcakes who'd clutch at any straw to seem interesting.
There are other forms of belief in past lives, like Otherkin (who I've mocked mercilessly in these pages before now), and Otakukin, who apparently reckon, with a perfectly straight face, that they're reincarnations of video game characters. Apart from obvious candidates like my brother being E. Honda from Street Fighter 2, I never really understood where that particular piece of lunacy came from.
Anyway, digression apart, the point which really stood out in the Tony Robinson programme was a fantastic book repository in Toulouse where they keep the original records of the Inquisition into the Cathar heresy.
I don't know what it is about huge old books that I like so much. The weight of history, the connection to other places, people and times and just the smell make me a bit giddy when I get my hands on one. However, when asked to see one particular 12th century record, the curator explained that for preservation reasons it was no longer possible to open that particular tome.
At that point I have to question the point of preservation; it's preservation of something just so it continues to exist and nobody can interact with it in any way - they can't even take it out of the box so people can look at the cover. For an object to have a point I think it has to, at least theoretically, be possible for people to interact with it in some way beyond just knowing that it is there in potentia. Beyond that, preservation for the sake of preservation just seems...pointless. What do you think?
There was a programme on the telly the other night about past lives - it was Tony Robinson and the Medieval Reincarnation if you're interested, and it was all about people who had been hypnotised to believe they were Cathars in a previous life. David's first rule of past lives is that the importance and interest of person you were in a previous life is inversely proportional to how interesting you are in this one, and the programme came to much the same conclusion - these former Cathars tended to be lonely fruitcakes who'd clutch at any straw to seem interesting.
There are other forms of belief in past lives, like Otherkin (who I've mocked mercilessly in these pages before now), and Otakukin, who apparently reckon, with a perfectly straight face, that they're reincarnations of video game characters. Apart from obvious candidates like my brother being E. Honda from Street Fighter 2, I never really understood where that particular piece of lunacy came from.
Anyway, digression apart, the point which really stood out in the Tony Robinson programme was a fantastic book repository in Toulouse where they keep the original records of the Inquisition into the Cathar heresy.
I don't know what it is about huge old books that I like so much. The weight of history, the connection to other places, people and times and just the smell make me a bit giddy when I get my hands on one. However, when asked to see one particular 12th century record, the curator explained that for preservation reasons it was no longer possible to open that particular tome.
At that point I have to question the point of preservation; it's preservation of something just so it continues to exist and nobody can interact with it in any way - they can't even take it out of the box so people can look at the cover. For an object to have a point I think it has to, at least theoretically, be possible for people to interact with it in some way beyond just knowing that it is there in potentia. Beyond that, preservation for the sake of preservation just seems...pointless. What do you think?
