The Age of Fire in History

This week I've been thinking about fire. It all started because of Bonfire Night, of course, the famous Fifth of November, which happened just after Obama got elected in the USA. For a moment one could think the fireworks were about him, people like him so much this side of the Atlantic. People were reading out bits of his acceptance speech: "To all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright..."

Well, people were not just wondering, they just know the beacon isn't burning as bright. Yes, we have lived in the Age of Fire, but it's coming to an end. The Industrial Age so far has been bright, quick and unpredictable like fire, and no wonder: at the bottom of it, the one thing that kept it going was, very litterally, fire: the burning of fossil fuels, first in steam engines, then in the bigger steam engines of power stations and the internal combustion engines of cars. Our heroes have come in flames, full of energy and firepower, bright, quick and unpredictable. And after your ex has been knifed, it seems tempting, oh so tempting, to go the way of so many heroes and burn the house of the baddies down.

But the beacon isn't burning as bright now. The Age of Fire is just a short period in time, a couple of centuries of brightly burning fossil fuels in the middle of milennia of living from the sun, water and wind. They say we're now entering the Age of Aquarius, the Age of Water, and somehow I can't believe it's going to be brighter and quicker than what came before. The old heroes of water and wind were something different. Maybe we should learn their ways. But who knows?

It takes some time to learn the ways of water, but one thing I've realised so far is how wrong most people get them. Somebody listed the cons of living in a houseboat in the harsh times that are coming:

No medical 

No growing land 

Big Storms

No help 

That somebody worries about the first three is understandable, even if they're mistaken. But no help? If there is one thing that I have discovered, is how much more likely you are to get help among seamen than anywhere else. A guy living here explained it to me: "Look, in the sea mistakes are deadly, and everybody has to help each other, or they'd all be dead. And that attitude stays with them on land."