Elegy for What’s Left of the Normal

I often catch myself mourning the normal that hasn’t ended yet. I’m living in Hyde Park finishing school after a year in Berkeley. The maple trees by my apartment have turned red, as usual. I like them. I don’t dread the future when I mourn. I don’t find high-variance futures in the abstract very scary. I’m worried AIs would destroy humanity, but I also have hope. I expect I won’t be mourning this moment in ten years, whatever happens. Mourning the present is like mourning a friendship when I move countries, because I know it’s not going to be the same. I start noticing our little inside jokes; our conversations linger in my memory longer. I live more, because I expect this moment to end soon. I.Last month my history of science professor took us to a museum to look at Egyptian artefacts. One of the archive items was the notebook of James Henry Breasted, whom UChicago appointed as America’s first professor of Egyptology 121 years ago. The yellowed pages held his cursive transcriptions of hieroglyphics. An archaeologist at the museum, turning the pages carefully with a wooden stick, joked that one of her dreams was for her notebook in 100 years to be displayed like this. My first thought was pretty uncharitable: wow, it’s crazy to expect this profession to still exist in 100 years. Probably we’ll have definitive answers to most answerable archaeological questions. Probably robots will be excavating the banks of the Nile and deciphering all the tablets in the world, if a compute-rich person or AI cares enough about this. Knowledge won’t be a slow and careful endeavour. The mathematicians are feeling it already. Then these thoughts passed and I felt a tender admiration for her. She had recently deciphered embalming recipes from the inscriptions on the outside of excavated jars. She showed us one, and the symbols looked entirely foreign to me. I imagined it must have taken years of patient effort to get to her level of knowledge. I knew a few people who wanted to be arch