Seeing all the retrospectives on Queen Elizabeth II’s life today makes me remember when my own family did that, at the end of my great-aunt’s life. (She lived to be 100 years old. We think she was holding on for that milestone, at the end.) She remembered when Amelia Earhart went down. She lived through both World Wars and the Great Depression. I don’t know if she ever had her own bank account.
I love this quote, from Terry Pratchett, about the speed of monarchic succession:
“The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Wheedle. He reasoned like this: you can’t have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles — kingons, or possibly queons — that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.”
Terry Pratchett, Mort
And the title of my post comes from this video by John Green.
It has been a long century. The next one will also be long. History is something that happens to us. But it is also something we make together.
John Green
Emilybook 