Notes to Self Vol. 1: Fragments of Thought Collected in a Bulleted List
Friedrich Strass, Der Strom der Zeiten, 1803 – Source
Buy art to remember momentous occasions
Ideas don’t have human rights
On traveling without taking pictures
On sending voice messages to friends
Start a travel publication focused on the development of self
Travels in potato chips
Hikes and pre-packaged sandwiches
“It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!” - Edmund in O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey into Night
“Some things are whole only when they shatter”
Find out vs. reason
Write about myself vs. my self
“My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world which, when all is said and done, suits me so well.” - George Orwell on the thoughts he had after being shot in the throat during the Spanish Civil War
On Strass’s Streams of Time
According to Berlin-based infographics scholar and concept developer Sandra Rendgen, concepts for timelines were only starting to be developed in the late 18th century, as time posed a greater challenge to visualize than space. “There was no well-established approach to visualizing time-based information,” she writes. Hard to believe in this modern age, when all our apps present our memories, activity, and other data to us in the form of a timeline or feed.
In the early 19th century, German writer and professor Friedrich Strass attempted to present world chronological history as Streams of Time, citing that we tend to its progression like the flow of a river. Of course creating a visualization of time requires reducing it. How else could Strass depict the course of human history from around 4000 BCE to his present day in 1803? A “universal history of mankind” is what Rendgen writes he was trying to show in a meter-long poster that was “clearly influenced by [then] contemporary cartography,” as can be seen in the artistic style of the streams. But the Public Domain Review is right to point out its obvious failings:
“Working with a hodgepodge mixture of Biblical, classical, and imperial accounts of world history, his chart begins with large, vague springs like ‘Chinese’ and ‘Assyrian,’ which themselves have no precursor, while Europe flows forth from the exclusive roots of Italian an Greek civilizations.”
A dangerous map, perhaps, where streams begin in the abstract realm of sky and cloud but flow down through the natural, human realm. And they stop at what was Strass’s present day, another indication that all this really maps is a 19th-century German mindset.
Both PDR and Rendgen call attention to the blank spaces, to the streams that go nowhere, to what’s missing. What can’t lines cover? As PDR points out, Euclid defines a line as “breadthless length” in his book Elements. A line is one dimensional. In Streams of Time, Strass works with the dimension of time while neglecting space, which is why we see so many gaps.
But, then, what can we expect from a timeline that plots the beginning of mankind and the 19th century as points that can be connected linearly?
Does a river really run through it?