A long time ago on a planet far far away Jane Austen, a middle class young woman of modest means, published a book she called “Pride and Prejudice”.
What nonsense am I pestering you with now, my patient readers? Don’t I know that Jane Austen was an inhabitant of our planet, Earth, the same one I am on right now? Yes that’s true in a sense. But the Earth of Jane Austen in the early 1800s is not only far away in time from us, it also occupied a place that is now far away behind our star and planet in a physical sense, in the sense of its physical relationship to the centre of our galaxy.
This is because our star, “Sun”, is travelling at a very considerable velocity around the centre of our galaxy dragging Earth and its other planets along with it. This is the reason that every January 1 when Earth returns to the same place in its orbit around the Sun which we are told it occupied on January 1 last year in fact Earth doesn’t and cannot return to that exact place. The orbit of Earth and our companion planets’ orbits are not in fact on one stable plane. Earth and our fellow planets describe a spiral in space. We leave our past behind in time but also in space. I’m already a considerable distance from the space I occupied when I wrote that last sentence and I will never, ever, be in the same space ever again even though there will be a January 13, 2023.
This image startles and fascinates me. As I move through time from moment to moment I am moving, and we all are moving, into a physical space utterly unique and never to be revisited. Every moment in time and space is as unique and unrepeatable as the moment that creates a new snowflake among all the trillions of snowflakes that are falling right now and all the uncountable giga-quadrillions of snowflakes that have ever fallen on planet Earth.
No! No! Don’t let us entirely lose the past! Don’t let it be abandoned! How can I have some way of preserving it? Writing was that sacred way of assuring our ghosts and our ancestors that we do not lose contact with them completely, nor lose contact with the memories and culture that has moulded our spirit. How can I keep faith with my era now passing away, how can I keep faith with my very spirit, if the planet is rushing away from my time so fast and meanwhile writing and reading is being as carelessly discarded, even vandalized, as the new innovations in digital technology are witlessly doing today?
I read Pride and Prejudice, I had and I have the skill to comprehend its old-fashioned language. I’m so grateful to my younger self for developing that skill. I have been so glad just lately to have and enjoy my DVD of my favourite motion picture adaptation of the book. I’ve been so anxious these last two years, so dizzy with the dislocations and isolation and devastation of the life I was living. I come once again with a sigh of relief to watch my DVD which begins with the dawn breaking over a green and burgeoning meadow, the birds chirping and a young woman walking while reading a book, the portrayal of Lizzy Bennett. A refuge. That’s what it is.
In a time and a galactic space nearer to our own, Pride and Prejudice the book saved many many young souls from madness at their darkest hour. Throughout the 1800s as literary fashion changed, Jane Austen’s works lost prestige and readership. Then came that catastrophe called World War One in 1914. Hundreds of thousands of young men found themselves in muddy, bloody trenches, terrified for their lives day and night. The British soldiers demanded pocket novels they could read in the moments of quiet just to have an escape for just a moment to save their sanity. What did they want? Some cheap detective novels or the latest literary stuff? No. They wanted Jane Austen, thousands of them did. Those Tommies were the reason Jane Austen was recognized as a genius and why she is so recognized even today. I understand why.
Wow. I sound so old fashioned that I could even read Jane Austen as well as those ordinary young Englishmen could in 1914. Good for me! I highly recommend taking command of your own language. Keep faith with your past, with your culture. There are treasures and refuges there.