“History is not a ladder we climb, but a canyon we descend—each layer a story, each fossil a forgotten truth.”
In the spring of the plague years, I went down.
Not metaphorically—though that too—but quite literally: into the Grand Canyon, down through rock older than life itself, each layer a scripture in sediment. Tommy, our river guide—equal parts maestro, maven, and modern-day Charon—navigated us through the silence and fury of deep time. No cell signal. No calendar. Just sun, stone, and the slow turning of the Colorado.
That trip wasn’t an escape. It was a reframing. A confrontation. The kind of canyon that swallows your assumptions and echoes them back as questions.
When I returned, I couldn’t see the human story the same way. I began a reading journey—across myth, history, empire, collapse, and rebirth—not to find answers, but to deepen the questions. The books below are sediment. They are fossils. They are songs echoing off canyon walls. They’re what helped me listen more deeply to the oldest thing we’re still forgetting: how strange and unfinished the human story truly is.
1. The First Fossil Hunters – Adrienne Mayor
How ancient myths of griffins, giants, and cyclopes may have been grounded in real fossil discoveries. A tale that reminds us myth is not nonsense, but sense drawn from stones.
2. Songlines – Bruce Chatwin
The land itself is a scripture, and walking is prayer. This book follows the Dreaming of Aboriginal Australians, where geography is inseparable from cosmology. A reminder that time can be sung.
4. Dominion – Tom Holland
Western secularism still wears Christ's sandals. Holland traces how the moral revolution of Christianity—centered on the suffering god—radically redefined power, justice, and dignity.
5. The Immortality Key – Brian Muraresku
A mystery that flows from ancient Dionysian rites to early Christianity, suggesting that sacramental psychedelics may have once opened the doors of divine encounter.
6. The Dawn of Everything – David Graeber & David Wengrow
An archaeological epic that tears down the myths of inevitability—hierarchy, agriculture, domination—and offers a kaleidoscope of how humans have actually lived: with imagination, freedom, and fluidity.
7. The Idea of God – John Hick
Rather than dogma, this book offers a philosophical opening: that all religions are fingers pointing at the same moon. A tectonic shift from exclusivity to pluralistic awe.
8. The Grand Improvisation – Derek Leebaert
Post-WWII, the American empire stumbled forward with borrowed myths and improvised purpose. This is the tale of how leadership passed hands, awkwardly and irrevocably.
9. Diplomacy – Henry Kissinger
From the Congress of Vienna to the Cold War, Kissinger sketches power as theater, history as chess, and diplomacy as the bloodless edge of empire.
10. 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed – Eric H. Cline
Networks of trade, trust, and grain unravel in this forensic epic of the Late Bronze Age collapse. Collapse isn't always thunder—it can be silence after the song.
11. The March of Folly – Barbara Tuchman
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From Troy to Vietnam, Tuchman traces the strange persistence of political self-destruction. When leaders know better—and still ride the wrong road. A tragic echo chamber of empire’s blind spots.
12. The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid – Homer & Virgil
Three poems, three fates: rage, return, and foundation. Together they form the bedrock of Western myth, showing how violence becomes glory, and exile becomes empire.
13. Pharsalia – Lucan
Rome devours itself. No gods descend, no heroes rise. Lucan’s bleak epic of civil war offers a counter-myth to Homer: history not as divine order, but chaos unbound. Unfinished and unpublished. Lucan wrote the poem against the wishes of Emperor Nero and was compelled to commit suicide.
14. East vs West: The Myths That Mystify – Devdutt Pattanaik (TED Talk)
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A mythic juxtaposition: cyclical vs linear time, harmony vs conquest, duty vs desire. This short talk opens a rift in how we imagine self and society.
15. The Collected Works of Ursula K. Le Guin
She didn’t write stories—she charted possible worlds. Whether in the anarchic solidarity of The Dispossessed or the Taoist quiet of Earthsea, Le Guin’s fiction whispers a forgotten truth: that we could be otherwise.
I came back from the canyon with calloused hands and a widened heart.
The canyon doesn’t care about our theories. It outlasts them. Yet it whispers: there were other ways. There still are. What we take for inevitability—the rise of the state, the conquest of nature, the hierarchies we serve—was once a choice. It still is.
Tommy, with his wry wisdom and total presence, moved us through those ancient bends not by dominating the river, but by dancing with it. That’s a kind of governance too. One that listens, adapts, and humbles itself before the flow.
So consider this a map—not of where to go, but where we’ve been. A way to feel the depth beneath our feet and remember that civilizations, like canyons, are carved slowly… but they are not permanent.
1 comment
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