How Much Is Left? | The Stoic Protocol for Your Next Zoom Call
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Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. How much is left? For hundreds of years it was a glittering, powerful empire, buildings and statues, rituals, traditions, millions of people, millions of events. And now, well after the decline and fall, how little of it remains? How little is left of Greece or Rome, besides some coins, some ruins, some stories?
As the great historian Jill Lepore writes, not just of the ancients, but of the more recent past as well. Most of what once existed is gone, she writes. Flesh decays, wood rots, walls fall in, books burn. Nature takes one toll, malice another. History is the study of what remains, what's left behind, which can be almost anything so long as it survives the ravages of time and war, letters,
diaries, DNA, gravestones, coins, television broadcasts, paintings, DVDs, viruses, abandoned Facebook pages, the transcripts of congressional hearings, the ruins of buildings. Some of these things are saved by chance or accidents, like the one house that as if by miracle still stands after a hurricane raises a town, but most of what historians study, she writes, survives because it was purposely kept in a box and carried up to an attic, shelved in a library, stored in a museum, photographed or recorded, downloaded to a server. carefully preserved or even catalogued. All of it, together the accidental and the intentional, this archive of the past, remains, relics, a repository of knowledge, the evidence of what came before this inheritance, is called the historical record, and it is maddeningly uneven, asymmetrical,
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