• she/her

Chinese Jewish furry herm foxtaur trans lesbian Hank Hill, aspiring anaesthesiologist

Show love and kindness to the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.



lorenziniforce
@lorenziniforce

this is a very well-known and traditionally-praised painting but it absolutely fascinates me for its candid nature and subject matter; taking the perspective of the portraits of the Spanish royal family and noblity Velázquez made a living creating, and reversing it, into a window of court life. I've seen it in person at the Prada in Madrid.

Despite it depicting such an distant world from the one we live in currently in so many ways, the dimly-lit, kind of boring gallery-room with the paintings barely even visible, the level of detail on the outfits, and poses and the inclusion of a sleeping dog and the man in the doorway; it feels so real, so believable. I can easily imagine what it feels like to stand in that room, despite it being a scene from three and a half centuries ago.

It's a reminder to me, of something fairly fundemental to my personal philosophy around history and the past; that the past is not an alien world, that people are always fundementally the same, even as nations and cultures rise and fall and change. That in any space, any enviroment across history, there's probably at least one person that, given i could understand their speech, i could strike up an earnest, heartfelt conversation with. This is something i dig into a lot in my writing and fiction; that even in fantastic lands, even in distant futures, people are still people, and i try and write them as - god my brain is telling me "human" but neither i or half the characters i write are human so that doesnt quite track - as possible.


quyksilver
@quyksilver

the past is not an alien world, that people are always fundementally the same

I recall reading a post about an ancient Egyptian (in like 2000 or 1000 BC), who worked as a funerary priest, doing the rites for a rich noble or Pharoah's tomb. That's not the interesting part though, the interesting part is that he had an annoying uncle who would send him letters nagging him about how to live his life. We know this, because this priest threw the letters away unopened.


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