It’s Solstice/Christmas time! This is a fun and small post about Christmas/Solstice and how the world works. Also, what greater rationalist holiday tradition does there exist than endlessly adjusting all of our songs and speeches and writing until all fault is hammered out of them.
In that spirit, my complaints about Time Wrote The Rocks:
We gaze upon creation where erosion makes it known,
And count the countless aeons in the banding of the stone.
Geological time isn’t countless; the earth is only around 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years old and the universe 13.7 ± 0.2 billion years old. Seems worth getting the age of creation right! In the technical sense, there are exactly four eons: the Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic and Phanerozoic. It’s awkward to find a singable replacement though, since “era” and “age” also have technical definitions.
The best replacements I’ve thought of are to either go with “ancient aeons” and trust everyone to understand that we’re not using the technical definition, or “And see the length of history in” if a nod to chronostratigrapy seems worth the cost in lyricism.
My ornery Solstice opinions that arise in the face of this as “I dunno, I think there are two halves of rational ritual. One is being willing to let go of things that were pretty but not true. But I think another part is ’being willing to chill out about some things and let them be vaguely metaphorical and pretty.” I realize aeon has something of a technical meaning, but it feels like one of the vaguer “technically technical” words, and I think it’s just kinda fine for this phrase to obviously mean “a fucking long time, man.”
Promoted to curated!
It’s Solstice/Christmas time! This is a fun and small post about Christmas/Solstice and how the world works. Also, what greater rationalist holiday tradition does there exist than endlessly adjusting all of our songs and speeches and writing until all fault is hammered out of them.
In that spirit, my complaints about Time Wrote The Rocks:
Geological time isn’t countless; the earth is only around 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years old and the universe 13.7 ± 0.2 billion years old. Seems worth getting the age of creation right! In the technical sense, there are exactly four eons: the Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic and Phanerozoic. It’s awkward to find a singable replacement though, since “era” and “age” also have technical definitions.
The best replacements I’ve thought of are to either go with “ancient aeons” and trust everyone to understand that we’re not using the technical definition, or “And see the length of history in” if a nod to chronostratigrapy seems worth the cost in lyricism.
My ornery Solstice opinions that arise in the face of this as “I dunno, I think there are two halves of rational ritual. One is being willing to let go of things that were pretty but not true. But I think another part is ’being willing to chill out about some things and let them be vaguely metaphorical and pretty.” I realize aeon has something of a technical meaning, but it feels like one of the vaguer “technically technical” words, and I think it’s just kinda fine for this phrase to obviously mean “a fucking long time, man.”
Agreed, “ancient aeons” would be my preferred edit.
It’s a’ight, but you lose the “count the countless” phrase which is where part of the literary heft comes from.