Sometime in the middle of the last century, my school sent our entire seventh-grade class on a special trip. We visited a company that provided testing to help determine our abilities, aptitudes, and proclivities (in order, I suspect, to aid the school in planning our future courses of study). I had a wonderful time there, because I enjoy taking tests—and the less I know about the subject, the more fun I have taking them. Part of the fun is figuring out why and how the tests work. It’s all a game to me.
But I digress.
Anyway… aside from the variety of tests we took, each of us had a personal interview with an evaluator. I was asked what I might like to be when I grew up. My answer: “Either an archaeologist or a paleontologist.”
When the evaluation came back, it said only “He might consider a career as an archaeologist or a paleontologist.” So much for all the elaborate testing; all the firm did was repeat what I had told them. On the other hand, maybe their bank of tests confirmed my interview comment.
The funny thing is that when I made that comment, I had overlooked the fact that I am extremely lazy—and both occupations require a lot of physical digging, a form of exercise that I avoid like the plague.
However, virtual digging—research—I love. Paleontology is an attempt to study the ultimate nature of things by looking at the evidence of ancient things—fossils, primarily. Archaeology does the same thing for culture. The truths they seek are usually deeply buried, hence all the shovel work.
What these sciences (and the philosophy behind them) try to do is answer the big question: what is our place in the universe (and, implicit in that, what—if anything—does it all mean?) These questions have haunted me all my life. Most people have had the same questions, ‘though perhaps without taking my approach to finding an answer. A lot of people latch onto religion, or some other form of mysticism, to explain it away—they simply kick the can far enough away to allow them to forget why they even asked.
That has never worked for me.
Taxonomy is a chart, the visual representation of paleontology’s findings. It’s a family tree of all of life. We try to picture the interconnectedness of all things, in the same way as we research our genealogies. Who are we, how did we get here, and how do we fit in? For me, the question(s) require a multifaceted search. My tools include biology, geology, anthropology, astronomy, etymology, history, physics, and even mythology. They are just a few of the archaeological and paleontological shovels that I have used (N.B., none of them cause backaches or blisters—or even sweat).
I am profoundly averse to anything that might cause me to break actual sweat.
I’m not confident that I will ever find the answers I seek. After all, humans have been struggling with these questions for as long as we’ve been human. It may be that even asking these questions defines us as human.
Not finding the answers—just looking for them.
The vaguely related little essay, below, has been ripped from the pages of a sort of memoir (The Digressions of Dr Sanscravat: Gastronomical Ramblings & Other Diversions):
Fossils
A few years ago, I took a bunch of academically- and socially-challenged ninth graders on a fossil-hunting field trip. Almost every one of them told me, in advance, that they would not be doing any digging. They wanted to make sure I understood that this trip was only interesting to me, not to them. They were far too cool for class trips of any kind.
The first site we visited was a Middle Devonian shale pit. The ground was covered with loose brachiopods. We were, in effect, walking on the bottom of a tropical sea that was nearly 400 million years old. Kids started scooping up fossils in a frenzy of raw avarice. They ran from place to place, filling pockets and bags with the shells of mucrospirifers. I was delighted by the sight—until they started asking if the fossils were valuable.
They wanted to sell them.
The fact that they were actually holding something that had been alive more than 200 million years before the first dinosaur did not impress them.
Once, while visiting Ticonderoga, I stood gazing solemnly upon a shattered mortar. Only an incredible force could have broken that eight-inch-thick metal. A couple of kids (of roughly the same age as my amateur paleontologists) walked by, laughing at the worthless piece of junk.
I could think of nothing but the final moments of the soldiers who had lit its fuse the last time. That broken bronze, those brachiopods—they are authentic. They have power to move those who will be moved. Apparently, people need to learn the empathic trick—and not many people are anxious to learn it anymore.
What is it about the authentic that moves us, and how do we teach it?
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