(1) "There's a strong movement on foot to drop hereditary names altogether."
That's from page 10 in the Herland Trilogy: Moving the Mountain by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (speculative fiction, 112 pages). She published Moving the Mountain in 1911, long before I was born and even before my parents were born. Who would I be if "hereditary names" had been dropped back then? Who would you be?
That's from page 1 of Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior by Bart Ehrman (2016, 336 pages). Ehrman presents an intriguing analysis of memory, based on psychology, sociology, and anthropology (also from page 1). Experiments have demonstrated that verbally transferred information changes significantly from person to person. So how accurately do you remember what someone told you a few years ago about someone else?
Deb Nance at Readerbuzz
hosts The Sunday Salon.
5 comments:
That's funny about hereditary names. I don't remember ever hearing that people were looking to get rid of them. Sounds like a movement that died out.
Thought-provoking thoughts, thanks for sharing!
Mark, notice the words "speculative fiction" about that book. It isn't history or even fiction about things we know, but what an author wrote about a world she invented.
To me, it's always interesting when I see studies about how inaccurate eyewitness accounts about an event are. I am reading a book now about the world's longest-running study about happiness, and the author notes that there are often discrepancies between the memories of the same event between spouses as well discrepancies between the account of the same event of the same person over time.
Oh that's an interesting quote about hereditary names. Would even make for a great passage to journal about!
Post a Comment