Conversational Outline Part 2

Won't Make Sense Unless You Read Part 1

I wonder, was it easier to come to terms with your own death at the time you lived? All of those gods you guys had. Did they help? Bacchus and his ilk. Victory and hers. Plastered all over the joint they were, in your time. We have different sorts of gods these days. We were invited to indulge in the worship of one of our favourites out in the gift shop after the exhibit.

There's another god we've got. A real doozie if you look at the story but the patina that's been left behind is a rather sickly sort of a green. Claimed he was a man and god at the same time, or from god. He was killed for that, amongst other things. Stories abounded at the time that he beat death, rose from the dead. That the kingdom of heaven was near to all. He was around in your era actually. Funny that.

And yet it doesn't seem to have done all that much to change the whole god concept, from where we stand here in our time. For all of his claims, two thousand years after he trod the earth the god most often represented out of the dead dry bones that have sprung up around him is still one who has about as much personality as a Bacchus marble bust. But still the whispers go on amongst people, even now.

I do wonder if it's much more difficult for us in my time to understand we are going to die. So many more baubles and trinkets to keep us living in la-la land. Things you would not believe. It would seriously boggle your mind. I watched a plane fly overhead as I drove in a car last night and either of those things would probably scare the shit out of you if you saw them out of context. So much has changed since your time. And yet, as they say, I bet so much has most likely remained the same. Human nature is still the same but sometimes it is more difficult to access what the hell we are. We are made dumb by our masses of information you see. I was able to watch today exactly what happened when the volcano erupted, you know? Your people didn't even have a word for "volcano".

It could be easy for us perhaps to presume that we are so much more enlightened than you, that you were a bit dimmer than we. Forgive us that. Our era blinds us. I suppose from your viewpoint we must seem like a bunch of informed dullwits in some ways. But you guys had running water and inside toilets and so what if you didn't have Wii or Facebook or encyclopedias or bachelor degrees? So what if you believed in a panoply of gods? We believe in a global economy. And the stuff we have made is dismantling us from each other and so how far have we really come? And in the end it's all still about the same old shit ~ power and privilege and blindness and the corrupted human nature.

Some things never change. Your doctors had instruments remarkably alike the ones we have now. They performed skull operations. They knew to boil their instruments in water afterwards and they extracted morphine from opium.

The time we live in now is strange; it's like trying to get hold of shadows and outlines in some ways. Our culture is rather a baby sort of a culture. I think yours was too, from the looks. The empire seems to do that to people. I wonder how close hope was to your life? It evades us here but many of us still hope, even if only to ourselves, that death does not have the last word.

My death looms up ahead but it's more like an outline, even though I have seen my fair share of it. I have more family members dead than alive these days. Perhaps it can never seem anything more to us than an outline. Perhaps that is partly what was so poignant about seeing yours today.

Part 3