The Day’s Frontiers?
“He whose vision cannot cover
History’s three thousand years,
Must in outer darkness hover,
Live within the day’s frontiers.”
“Wer nicht von dreitausend Jahren
Sich weiß Rechenschaft zu geben,
Bleibt im Dunkeln unerfahren
Mag von Tag zu Tage leben.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
West-östlicher Diwan (1819)
Erich Neumann used this quotation from Goethe’s 1819 collection of lyrical poems, West-östlicher Divan (which, according to Jeffrey Einboden, “constitutes a unique culmination of the 18th and 19th century European encounter with extra-biblical scripture and sacred verse”), as the epigraph to his seminal work, Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1954. R.F.C. Hull’s translation of Neumann’s Ursprungsgeschichte des Bewusstseins, Zurich: Rascher Verlag. 1949).
Every one of us can only ever act here and now, in the moment, “within the day’s frontiers.” The question is, what is the depth of our awareness of the trajectories that brought us to this very particular moment within which we make choices and engage the world? For Goethe, “History’s three thousand years,” constituted the full arc of known human events. In the 21st Century, our awareness of imagined pre-now time has expanded significantly.
Were he writing today, Goethe might refer to 14 billion years (or 18 billion years), the imagined age of our universe. Or to 4.5 billion years, the estimated age of planet Earth. Or, if he retained a human focus, he might speak of “History’s 1.4 million years,” which marks the known origins of fire-hardened pottery. That event may mark the beginning of the human experiment, for where there’s human-controlled fire, there are story telling primates weaving up patterns of neural behavior. And who can say how the trajectories of those ancient mental habits inform our lives still?
This blog, The Day’s Frontiers, reflects on contemporary events in hopes of revealing the trajectories of a planetary birth, now in progress. At best: One continuous mistake.