Language at the End of the World (2017)

cabinetmagazine.org

74 points·aaronharnly··6 comments

What do you think — is it more lonely, or less, to have this phantom trace of a communication from a destroyed culture and people, which more than likely we will never be able to read? I find it so haunting, like a hand raised to the window pane of a passing train — nearly a connection, but more painful for being a missed one.

Well maybe but the more painful thing is how their whole civilization was destroyed by colonialists.

I don't think there are any great secrets in those texts, just humanity.

The fact that we can not read these texts in fact tells us more than if we could, it tells us it is possible to annihilate other cultures totally. It tells us about the evil of colonialism.

When traveling around Mexico, I kept wondering how it would have been like today, if we (Europeans) had behaved in a different way.

I think that somebody would have united all native populations against the Aztecs. An European or else.

Definitely more lonely, given that what finished them off was the same Power that still courses through most of the developed world.

>"following a pattern called the reverse boustrophedon. Boustrophedon is a Greek word meaning “in the manner of an ox,” and scripts written in it move like an ox plowing a field, reversing direction with each line."

Some day a future civilization is going to have to attempt to decipher our language in the same way.

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