The Width of the Past

We file the whole ancient world into one drawer marked "long ago" — pharaohs, pyramids, Cleopatra, pressed flat together. Pull them apart and the distances inside are staggering. Cleopatra, the last pharaoh, lived closer in time to you — to the phone in your hand, the rocket, the internet — than to the building of the Great Pyramid.

The Pyramid was already ancient when she was born. More than two thousand years stood between her and its construction; to her it was a monument to a past she could only guess at, its builders as remote from her as she now is from us. When she looked up at it, she was looking at deep history, not her own age.

We picture her among the pyramid-builders. She was nearer to spacecraft. The "ancient world" we collapse into a single moment is, inside itself, wider than the gap between its end and now.

Time does not bunch up just because it is far away. It only looks that way from a distance — the way far mountains seem to stand shoulder to shoulder while miles of valley lie between them.

And if the past is far deeper than it feels — how much of history are we crushing into one careless glance?