. . . for historians ought to be precise, faithful, and unprejudiced; and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor affection, should make them swerve from the way of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depository of great actions, the witness of what is past, the example and instruction to the present, and monitor to the future.
Thinking back on the year 1969, all that comes to mind for me is a swamp--a deep, sticky bog that feels as if it's going to suck my shoe off each time I take a step. I walk through the mud, exhausted. In front of me, behind me, I can see nothing but an endless swampy darkness.
Time itself slogged along in rhythm with my faltering steps. The people around me had gone on ahead long before, while my time and I hung back, struggling through the mud. The world around me was on the verge of great transformations. Death had already taken John Coltrane, who was joined now by so many others. People screamed there'd be revolutionary changes--which always seemed to be just ahead, at the curve in the road. But the "changes" that came were just two-dimensional stage sets, background without substance or meaning. I trudged along through each day in its turn, looking up only rarely, eyes locked on the endless swamp that lay before me, planting my right foot, raising my left, planting my left foot, raising my right, never sure where I was, never sure I was headed in the right direction, knowing only that I had to keep moving, one step at a time.
THOMAS—T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral (1935, 4th ed. 1938)
We do not know very much of the future
Except that from generation to generation
The same things happen again and again.
Men learn little from others' experience.
But in the life of one man, never
The same time returns. Sever
The cord, shed the scale. Only
The fool, fixed in his folly, may think
He can turn the wheel on which he turns.
On out-of-the-way shores, local historians ply their craft. Their burden is giving form to little places in an era of massive forces and generalizations. Like folklorists or ethnographers, they strive to keep alive in memory ways of life and habits of mind that civilization no longer countenances. And their reward for doing so is carrying out the duty of their affection. Their passion for the meanings of small things forces them to deliberate not just on the fate of their beloved places but on all things human. Their faithfulness to home is a compass in a great and shifting sea.
Although it forever moves between the ragged edge of contemporary change and the cutting blade of time, local history compensates its practitioners with the blessing of preserving and creating other lives, places, and times. Surely, to offer a consolation tinged with melancholy, there are less-worthy callings than giving fresh forms, however transitory they be, to the work and complex ways of human beings.
Local history can also bless one with a passion and a mission. How can one measure the gift of being joined to a conversation one can't truly quit? How wonderful it is to be caught up with a hundred topics that need exploration and exposition!...The local historian's driving ambition is to record the manifold realities of the place one calls home.
I am an old man now and oftentimes I whisper to myself. I have heard myself whispering things that I didn't know I had ever thought. "Forty years" or "Fifty years" or "Sixty years," I hear myself whispering. My life lengthens. History grows shorter. I remember old men who remembered the Civil War. I have in my mind word-of-mouth memories more than a hundred years old. It is only twenty hundred years since the birth of Christ. Fifteen or twenty memories such as mine would reach all the way back to the halo-light in the manger at Bethlehem. So few rememberers could sit down together in a small room. They could loaf together in the old poolroom up in Port William and talk all of a Saturday night of war and rumors of war.—Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow (2000)
"Look at her up there, offering herself like—"
"Who? Sobriety doesn't suit you. Good God." Marlon handed over his own drink. "It's delicious," he said.
Viktor looked down at it. "I don't drink."
"You don't?" Marlon thought through the past weeks, and took back his glass. "You mixed the vat last night. And you're always dropping things. You're the drunkest man I know."
"I've never touched the stuff. I couldn't dance."
"But when you were younger."
"I started training when I was eight." Viktor poked the fire with a long branch and said, "Tell me something. Tell me why I could walk down a street in the city and see two faces in the crowd. And one of them—a stranger—it might be a beautiful woman—for one of them I feel nothing, I remain intact. And the other, no more beautiful, no more spectacular: When I see her, I fall through the universe. And only because of our past, only because of some promise my idiot heart made itself years before."
"Why don't you try a drink."
"The truth is, there's no such thing as love. There's only history."—Rebecca Makkai, The Hundred-Year House (2014)
These were the map carvings of professional statesmen. Among private people who did not know Schleswig-Holstein from Bohemia, a deep underlying recognition had grown by the time the war was twenty days old that the world was engaged by "the largest human fact since the French Revolution." Though a tremendous catastrophe, it seemed, in August when it was still new, to contain that "enormous hope," the hope of something better afterward, the hope of an end to war, of a chance to remake the world. Mr. Britling in Wells' novel, who, though fictional was representative, thought it might prove a "huge step forward in human life. It is the end of forty years of evil suspense. It is crisis and solution." He saw "a tremendous opportunity...We can remake the map of the world...The world is plastic for men to do what they will with it. This is the end and the beginning of an age..."--Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (1962)
So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates, with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. After them came five heirs apparent, forty more imperial or royal highnesses, seven queens--four dowager and three regnant--and a scattering of special ambassadors from uncrowned countries. Together they represented seventy nations in the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and, of its kind, the last. The muffled tongue of Big Ben tolled nine by the clock as the cortege left the palace, but on history's clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendor never to be seen again.--Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (1962)
Since then Bartley had always thought of the British Museum as the ultimate repository of mortality, where all the dead things in the world were assembled to make one's hour of youth the more precious. One trembled lest before he got out it might somehow escape him, lest he might drop the glass from over-eagerness and see it shivered on the stone floor at his feet. How one hid his youth under his coat and hugged it! And how good it was to turn one's back upon all that vaulted cold, to take Hilda's arm and hurry out of the great door and down the steps into the sunlight among the pigeons—to know that the warm and vital thing within him was still there and had not been snatched away to flush Caesar's lean cheek or to feed the veins of some bearded Assyrian king. They in their day had carried the flaming liquor, but to-day was his!—Willa Cather, Alexander's Bridge (1912)
[Ian] Davie has an interesting section where he talks about the nature of mythological and poetic writing—which is the genre of the Vedas and other early Hindu scriptures on which the later, more philosophical commentaries were based. Having distinguished the vertical (ontological) dimension from the horizontal (historical, empirical), he explains that the "vertical" is always best expressed in poetry and myth. This leads him to deplore the "demythologization" of religion. In a theological context, he says, the word "mythology" means "the horizontal (i.e., spatio-temporal) representation of a vertical (i.e., eternal) truth: when there is no vertical dimension, I would want to say we are dealing, not with theological myth, but with theological fable."—Ian Davie's Jesus Purusha, quoted in Stratford Caldecott, The Radiance of Being: Dimensions of Cosmic Christianity (2013)
The theological method... is neither one nor the other; neither mythological nor historical, but a combination of both. Thus it uses history as a critique of myth, and myth as a critique of history; for the whole theological purport of myth is to indicate the limits of history, to elicit from the mythological language (which it necessarily uses in speaking of events which are transhistorical, in the exact sense that they are limits of history) a sense of what lies beyond history, the "beyond" of all time.
Purcell said, "World's changed. Time is come when education, self-improvement don't matter. It's come back to a man's got to know what he's good at. Your history will either help or hinder."-- Frank Bill, Donnybrook (2013)
Jarhead waved the smoke from his face and said, "History?"
Purcell said, "Your kin. What they done did hoping to make this world a better place. Things your father and grandfather learned you. How to use your hands. Plant a garden. Hunt. Fish. Fight. What some seem to forget is history is now doomed to repeat itself, seeing as ain't nobody learned from their mistakes. Now no one can stop what has started."
Lost, Jarhead asked, "What's started?"
Purcell told him, "We're at the beginning of a violent era. Jobs are gone. Self worth and moral values have been sold. Some, like Alonzo, even prey on children. Film it, take pictures of it, and sell it. They's too much freedom, addiction, fear, and violence blinding us from the truth."
Jarhead crossed his arms across his chest, convinced that Purcell was fifty-two cards shy of a full deck, and asked "What truth?"
Purcell could read Jarhead's expression, his thoughts. "That things have fallen apart. Everything our kin suffered to build is being disassembled. Criminals run everything now, government, everything. Gangsters the only one seeing any profit. We got no jobs, no money, no power, no nothin', nothin' to live for 'cept vice and indulgence. That's how they control us. But it's falling apart. What we got is our land and our machines, our families, and our ability to protect it all, to keep them alive. We got our hands. Ones who'll survive will be the ones can live from the land. Can wield a gun. Those folks'll fight for what little they've got. They'll surprise the criminals with their own savagery. Man, woman, and child will be tested. Others'll be too weak and scared. Uneducated in common sense. Won't know what's happened. But believe me, war is coming."
