Tesh

I have this weird obsession with looking at really old cave art. This has been going on for a while but last night in The Anthropocene Reviewed I read the essay about Lascaux, and so far that one has been my favorite and it has renewed a frenzy of looking at pictures of all these things and reading all sorts of articles.

Whenever I have had the opportunity, I have gone to look at old petroglyphs (which I highly recommend), but none of those were ever even close to as old as some of these sites like Lascaux. (Although after a brief google search I found record of some petroglyphs that are just a few thousand years younger than Lascaux (the paintings there are about 17,000 years old). The petroglyphs I have seen have all been younger than about 1,500 years.)

I'm not completely sure why I bring this up. It just really... Puts things into perspective.

Here's a quote from the essay that I loved. (Note that due to humans frequently visiting Lascaux, mold began to grow and damage the paintings, and so replicas of the cave have been built so people can still see the paintings even though the actual cave is closed off from the public.)

"The cave paintings as Lascaux exist. You cannot visit. You can go to the fake cave we've built, and see nearly identical hand stencils, but you will know: This is not the thing itself, but a shadow of it. This is a handprint, but not a hand. This is a memory that you cannot return to. And to me, that makes the cave very much like the past it represents." 

(I highly recommend reading The Anthropocene Reviewed as well. It's written by John Green, and is absolutely fantastic. I can't bring myself to read it quickly because it's just so beautiful, and so I'm only a few essays into it. I'm trying to savor every moment.)