ftentimes, individuals view the past as an archive of our achievements and our failures; we refrain from recalling that each and every person has lived a life as impassioned and as intricate as our own, most especially/particularly in the case of the immortalized figures of our forebears, as we are all occupied with the amassed load of our own enjoyments, aspirations, companions, worries, and aversions. Grace Lee Boggs, a former American author, social activist, philosopher and feminist, sagely stated in her powerful and deeply humanistic novel, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, “History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories – triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally – has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.” If history is not the past, then how may we unveil the truth behind past predicaments, and how they were handled, without the blight of bias? How may we acknowledge our ancestors, and learn from their experiences? What are we if not our history?
The (approximately 20,000) citizens of the prosperous city of Pompeii were long accustomed to the frequent though faint tremors that rocked the earth of their home; thus, upon feeling the ground gently quiver on (that fateful date in) October 24, 79 AD, the preponderance of the populace were unconcerned. Pompeii was one of an abundance of towns within the vicinity of Mount Vesuvius, a stratovolcano in modern-day Italy.
It was an early autumn morning, and smaller fissures and releases of ash and smoke on the mountain went largely unnoticed, the residents of the region much too preoccupied with their own established routines. Promptly, in a manner quite parallel to the/a (frightful powerful earthquake/occurrence) seventeen years prior, the ground began to vibrate especially violently; the residents were in a panic, many attempting to evacuate (in a frenzied (fashion)).
(At approximately 1:00 pm, Mount Vesuvius cataclysmically erupted, spewing up a high
