Layers
My family and I just got back from a two-week trip to Europe (Italy and Greece). It was amazing, and I’ll be thinking about what I saw for years (no amount of hyperbole can do Pompeii justice). As I worked on the second Julia Z book (my new techno-thriller series) during the trip, I was struck by some of the resonances between my surroundings and her world.
Classical Greece and Rome were built with stone, and that choice has shaped the way we engage with the past. Stone lasts. Things built with stone—and Roman concrete, which might as well be stone—have a better chance of being there in a thousand years than just about anything else. Everywhere you go in Italy and Greece, ancient ruins (sometimes still functional) stand proudly among modern buildings, tangible reminders that Faulkner was absolutely right: The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Stone lasts even when it is removed from its original structure and repurposed into something new. After the statues at the Parthenon were removed to the British Museum, and after the marble and bronze of the Pantheon were reincorporated into St. Peter’s Basilica, the objects continued to speak mutely, reminding the audience that the great powers who now used them for adornment were but latecomers, arrogant children standing on the shoulders of giants.
It’s worth remembering that this is not true—or at least not true to the same degree—for cultures that built with perishable materials: wood, bamboo, paper, rammed earth. Unless actively maintained, these structures will perish in fire, flood, war, often lasting no more than decades, much less centuries. The large-scale constructions of these cultures do not last beyond their builders. The Colosseum survived the Visigoths, Vandals, Normans, earthquakes, looters, grazing sheep, popes who craved its marble—two millennia later, you can still hold an event there with minimal preparation. Meanwhile, not a single building from contemporaneous Han Dynasty China survives (beyond some tamped earth bits of the Great Wall); all we have are written descriptions, tomb paintings, excavated foundations and traces, later reconstructions, ceramic models—memories of the past, not the tangible past itself.
(Could the absence of tangible ruins be a contributing factor to why some cultures are more prone to totalizing revolutionary fervor, to give in to the temptation to bulldoze everything in order to build an ahistorical modernity? I’m skeptical about cultural essentialism, but I wonder.)
Which brings me to the present. We experience the layering of time not just in Rome and Athens, but also in our language. Greek and Latin roots, like the Elgin Marbles and the facade of the Pantheon, have been repurposed to build the neologisms of our future. Aphorisms, quotes, dead metaphors, fossilized morphemes and grammatical structures—they persist in our language like the marble ruins that greet visitors at every turn in Rome. Every time you use the English language, you revive the words of Sappho and Pericles, Tully and Caesar, Alfred and William the Conqueror, Shakespeare and Milton, and thence to all the great thinkers of the modern world who have built with English as it transformed into a global language. Language is the memory of our ancestors; when we speak and think in English, we literally retrace history with our tongues.
(Language, of course, isn’t stone—its history must be actively remembered, sought out, reconstituted and reconstructed by every generation. In this sense, it’s perhaps more akin to the cultures who built with perishable materials—memory, after all, is the most perishable thing of all for us mortal creatures.)
This, by the way, is the real “intelligence” in large language models. That pattern-matching machines can do so much with so little “reasoning” is a testament to the rich cognitive trove we’ve encoded in our collective linguistic productions. Each time an LLM answers a question, it literally retraces history through its cascading weights.
The second Julia Z book is about all of this: the layering of history, the erasure of the past, the absences that reorient the present like hidden magnets, the pattern-seeking machines that force us to confront mortality.
Until next time.
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