I started reading The Tale of Genji during the pandemic, figuring I might as well improve my mind during lockdown. It’s considered the oldest novel on record, possibly the first one ever written. Early in the book, there’s an incident where the main character has a crush on a girl, so he tries to sneak into her family’s property to get close to her, and along the way he runs into this ancient old grandma who can’t half see and who mistakes him for one of her grandkids. So she’s standing there going on and on about her digestive difficulties and whatever, and he can’t speak up because if she hears his voice she’ll know he’s not who she thinks he is, so he’s just having to stand there and nod and hope she’ll go away soon. And I’m reading all this and thinking that with a couple of adjustments this could be a modern day sitcom, and it made me happy to think that a thousand years ago someone was laughing at the same sort of stuff we laugh at today.

i read dickens’ great expectations in little fifteen minute installments on my breaks at work, sitting there dirty and tired and sweaty in a hot factory, and it made me think about how a hundred and sixty years ago there were probably tired guys in hot factories reading the story the exact same way, bit by bit, at their stupid jobs they couldn’t afford to quit and were damn lucky even to have, and they too were glad to read the next chapter of mr dicken’s latest weird little story about weird little people

in reading War and Peace I’ve discovered that “doing math homework at the dining room table with your angry dad” has been a common terror since the 1800s

i remember reading tom sawyer, specially the part where he gets chastized erroneusly for dropping the sugar and he just spends minutes sitting in silence sulking and fantasizing about how sad everyone would be if he died and reveling in the self pity of how lonely and misunderstood he is and as a teenager who did exactly that with my 14 years of age i was shocked that an adult in the 1800’s had managed to capture that so well

Remember all those memes about “what if we just pretend 2016/2020/etc never happened and never mention it again”? In 2004 BC, a refugee from Ur looked back on the past year and wrote: "May this year not be placed in the reckoning of years! May its number be taken down from its peg in Enlil’s temple, and may its name be unspoken, to far off days, to other days, and to the end of time.“

There’s another heartbreaking one from the same period in which a woman mourning her son’s murder specifically grieves for “my son who will never bring wedding gifts to his father-in-law’s house, my son who will never bounce a child on his knees.”

And some time between 2200 and 1900 BCE, a refugee from the destroyed city of Isin (now in South-Central Iraq) wrote this:

“This is my house, where good food is not eaten (not anymore).
This is my house, where good drink is not drunk (not anymore).
My house, where good seats are not sat in (not anymore)
My house, where good beds are not laid in (not anymore)…
My house, where no happy husband dwells with me,
My house, where no sweet child dwells with me.
My house, through whose doors, I, though jts mistress, never grandly pass-
Never grandly pass, the doors of this house,
In which I dwell no more.
I- let me go into my old house, let me go in,
Let me lie down, let me lie down!
Let me go into my storehouse, oh let me in
Let me lie down, let me lie down there,
I- Let me lie down to sleep in my own house,
It was sweet sleep I had there.
Let me lie down in my house, let me lie down there in my bed,
It was a good bed.
I- Let me sit down on my own chair-
It was a good chair.”