The Doors of Perception

Oct. 21, 2010:
One of the items in the paper today (yes, I still occasionally read the dead tree daily) is the announcement that archaeologists have discovered . what may be the oldest door in Europe. The Methuselan mahogany is estimated at five thousand years old, and hails from Switzerland. The locale of the find is not surprising, since the lakes of the Helvetian Republic have revealed many archaeological treasures. The chief archaeologist, Niels Bleicher, describes the antediluvian door in somewhat effusive terms. Certainly, the door must have been sturdy to weather five millennia of environmental abuse, but I do wonder: how much of the description of ancient artifacts is in self-defense. I prefer stairs to cellar doors, and would hesitate to dismiss an artefact as insignificant due to its basic utility, but hoi polloi might well say, "Who cares? It's just a door, even if it is well-made." Yet it is the simple things of a culture that tell you the most: individually wrapped slices of synthetic cheese and unbiquitous redundant and downright insulting instructions tell you more about American culture than the the abstract of an ivory tower thesis on trash. The facile dismissal of ordinary things, although the result of knee-jerk anti-intellectualism, can lead to an equally erroneous reaction of overstatement. The archaeologists, in counteracting the public dismissal, place a greater emphasis than is warranted on their discovery. Although this reaction is not restricted to antiquarians (since everyone who believes in reincarnation wants to be a king, not a catamite), it seems that the more "ordinary" the object, the greater is this tendency.