The world has changed so much over the past few decades that it’s hard to imagine what life must have been like a century or two ago. It’s hard to believe, but people once got by without gasoline and electricity and professional sports and refrigerators and video cell phones and e-mail and microwaved food. That’s what makes the new TV series “Jericho” sort of interesting, despite some really crummy acting and plot lines. What if some nukes really did go off and our economy was gone, and in order for anyone at all to survive we had to go back to eighteenth century ways of living? In Jericho, nobody seems to have the faintest idea of how to do that. They’re just living off their stores and complaining and forming militias and hoping that something will save them from their steadily worsening lot. Well, in order to avoid a total crash in ratings, I suppose that the script writers at CBS are planning something like, though not without some intrigue (i.e., just who is Hawkins working for?).

But enough about such depressing subjects like Jericho and nuclear terrorism. Let’s ponder something that has not changed in 100 or 200 or 500 years. I was reading a William James essay on the nature of consciousness, and I was taken by a metaphor he used to exemplify how hard it is to capture a moment of change between our various thought patterns. Here’s what he said: “As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop . . . .” That distracted me from James’ main point, and made me realize that back in his day, around a century ago, snowflakes were the same as they are now. And so were hands. And so was what happens when you let a snowflake fall on your hand. You could go back 200 or 2000 years, and it would still be the same. People from long ago, people who are long dead, had the same little experiences in their lives that we have today, even if they never watched Sunday NFL action on a big-screen TV.

That’s something to ponder as December progresses, as the days grow dark and cold, as the snowflakes start to fall. Someday, everyone alive today will be gone, and people will think about how different their lives are from the way it was in 2006 (although with global warming and nuclear terrorism on the horizon, I’m not sure if that means more or less wealth and consumer electronics). But the snow will still fall, and occasionally someone, mostly children, will notice when a pretty snowflake pattern quickly vanishes into a drop of water on the skin.