More on History
Most historical facts are unpleasant.
It is impossible to write ancient history because we do not have enough sources, and impossible to write modern history because we have far too many.
What is the use trying to describe the flowing of a river at any one moment, and then at the next moment, and then at the next, and the next, and the next? You wear out. You say: There is a great river, and it flows through this land, and we have named it History.
Whenever you start digging into history, history is re-written all over again. The more you dig, the more you gain, and the more you lose faith from history.
Men write history for many reasons; to try to understand the forces which impel mankind along its strange course; to justify a religion, a nation, or a class; to make money; to fulfil ambition; to assuage obsession; and a few, the true creators, to ease the ache within.
Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. … The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying.
Russell Jacoby Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)
There are two ways of summing up world history, the inner way and the outer way. Both have been at the mercy of scribes and policies.
Vera Stanley Alder Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950)
Ghosts of my history will follow me there/And the winds of the old days will blow through my hair
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