"People who have never read George Santayana are doomed to repeat one sentence of his and none other." I made that up. It's actually worse than his quote about people who don't know history being doomed to repeat it, though. Even the people who do know history are doomed to repeat it. They may even be worse, because the one's who don't know it have a certain refreshing random quality. We get some difference out of that. From what I read of current historians, they are great if they stick to narrow topics, but when the generalise, they say the same crap that everyone else at the conference is saying, however much they nearly come to blows about the details. A lot of it is complaining about how other historians aren't emphasising hamsters or cabbages enough.
I read an account of an Inuit out in the villages near Nome, who was asked by a visitor about the burial ground, and how to identify who is where. Is it written down anywhere? Could it be written down anywhere? The 70-year-old man was unconcerned. "I have it all in my head. We don't need to write it down." But he had not taught it to anyone, what if he dies? "We have our stories to remind us, " he assured her, which what sounded to me like extreme arrogance. Tribes believe this, and there are legends about the enormous stores of knowledge that are held in collective memory, such as in Roots in Africa. These are mostly crap. Wherever they have ancestor worship and the name is important there is long memory, as in China (though not everywhere in China). But mostly there is only this proud assurance, which a fresh group of missionaries forty years later discovers is quite different from what they were assured was the True History of the Tribe as told to other missionaries, who carefully preserved it.
So, I thought about the old Inuit, you don't actually have a history, and the information of where people are buried will shortly be lost. Great.
But maybe any story will do, right? Does it have to be a true story for the tribe to get by? Maybe it just needs to be a story. And maybe that is true for us as individuals as well. I am quite obsessed with getting the story right, but does it do anyone any good, even me? I'd probably be happier if I believed some other story about myself than the one I know is true.
Maybe there is no history.
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Brought forward from five years ago.
Groups complain that their contributions have been lost to history. That's usually not untrue.
Except...
Nearly everything is lost to history. My family, your family. My state, your state. My nationalities, your nationalities. My religion, your religion. Is the history of Presbyterianism covered in US History in school? A lot of interesting things happened to the Portuguese, but are those remembered outside of Portugal, and maybe Brazil? Myths and rumors, mostly. A few study hard and learn what they hope is the most important 1% of it. In America, the Quakers and Congregationalists get in because of founding, then disappear. Catholics and Jews get in because of immigration, then they disappear. Black people come in because of slavery and emancipation, then used to disappear. There is an effort now to make sure their contributions, especially to music and modern politics, don't get overlooked. Though even in the bad old days of my youth, when black history was supposedly suppressed, people knew the music part, and then the civil rights movement part.
People knew something of Native American history, but a lot of it was wrong. The history of Asian-Americans mostly fell beneath the waves. The Irish, Greeks, and Italians have made a big deal about perpetuating their heritage. They have put in much more effort than most other American groups, but in the end, it's mostly about food and old costumes now. The Scots in some places. Scandinavians in the Midwest. In Canada they remember the French. A bit.
History went on for a lot of years, in a lot of places, no? Much of it was unremembered a week later, and nearly all of it was lost once the witnesses died. If it wasn't written down, it was gone - and most of what was written down molders in obscurity also. We don't remember the history of women. Well, women was not a general category of history until quite recently. Females might think about "the women of my family or village," or a minority might think about a larger category such as "Jewish women" or "Russian women," but people just didn't think like that. Not men either.
We remember wars, kings, exploration and trade goods. Even those fade quickly. How far back can you name even presidents. Some fragments of songs, art, folk-religion get kept.
I have five children, of whom two will remember a great deal about me after I die. Yet even that "great deal about me" is about 1% of what there is. Some things I never brought up. I think I hit most of the main points. The other three, some. I have four granddaughters, two far away. When they are eighty the two near ones will remember the strangest things about me. After that, rumors and myths.
If I get to be Mad Baggins in some way that will be far better than one in a thousand achieve.
This is why the focus on resentment of being lost to history is such a dangerous one. It leads people to focus on making history rather than on real people.
11 comments:
I have five children, of whom two will remember a great deal about me after I die. Yet even that "great deal about me" is about 1% of what there is. Some things I never brought up. I think I hit most of the main points. The other three, some.
At least two fathers of childhood friends have written book length memoirs for their families. I enjoyed reading them, as they gave me added perspective on two people from my childhood. Undoubtedly their children and grandchildren also enjoyed reading them. I still keep in touch with members of those families. My father was diagnosed with incurable cancer three months before he died at age 67, so death came to him at an age before most think about writing a memoir. (One of the above memoirs was finished months before the author died at age 90.)
I recently wrote a four page eulogy for a family friend who died at age 95. Her children did not recall several of the incidents I wrote about, which points out that different people have different memories.
For family stories having different recipients, consider the following.Several years before she died in the 1980s, my aunt told me of an incident at the funeral of her three year old brother back in the 1920s. Laura R, a sister of my great-grandfather, showed up at the funeral. My grandfather, a nephew of Laura R, told her that she should leave ASAP. "I just wanted to see what he looked like." There was apparently some irreconcilable conflict between my great-grandfather and his sister Laura R.(From what I hear, my great-grandfather was rather argumentative.)
Years later, I was talking about this incident to my cousin, the daughter of the aunt who told me the story. Apparently she hadn't heard the story from her mother. My cousin had an interesting reply. She lived with our grandparents, along with her mother and brother, for several years during high school. During this time my cousin was dating a Larry R, who would have been a cousin or great-nephew of Laura R. My cousin said that my grandparents never said anything negative about Larry R, but she could tell our grandparents did not have a positive reaction to Larry R. My cousin told me that the conflict with Laura R from decades past was probably why our grandparents didn't have a positive reaction to Larry R. My cousin was engaged to Larry R, but married someone else.
Sic transit gloria mundi, but on the other hand current physics suggests that information cannot be lost. Someday, should someone figure out how, the whole story of each of us will be on full display. Probably few of us would want to be as well known as we would be then.
"focus on resentment of being lost to history is such a dangerous one"
I don't think this is the biggest danger. By far, the biggest danger is to include yourself in a group that extends backward in history, where members of that group were unjustly mistreated. "We were slaves", "we were sent to concentration camps", "we were attacked by ... (the bad guys)". In most cases, those now living did NOT suffer the historical injustice.
And there is no just way to compensate the true victims of the past, now dead; helping their descendants may be noble, but it's not really justice.
What isn't written down will be lost. What IS written down may be lost. But first, it will be misinterpreted. Likely by someone who disagrees with it, or thinks he knows better that the writer.
I've been Project-Gutenberging a scholarly work on Greek marbles and bronzes depicting athletes. A strong undercurrent is how much we can find out about the results of Olympic games--a surprising amount, apparently--and how fragmentary our information is about specific athletes and about specific sculptors or even schools. There are whole artworks and there are fragments. There are schools of thought about where the fragments fit. Some sculptors were celebrated in manuscripts that happen to have survived, sometimes by mere luck and sometimes because a writing struck enough of a chord to be copied often. There are copies of artworks, some contemporary, some not. These are people who were rock stars in their day, the athletes and the artists, but we're not always sure who taught whom or whether two works are from the same artist or two rivals.
Despite all that, the artistic flowering itself took place in a fairly confined area during a relatively short period, but has captured the imagination of a broad segment of the world for thousands of years. At some point, an artist or several artists got the idea that a nude male form should stand naturally with his primary weight on one leg and the rest of his body reacting in equilibrium. This explosive notion took over the art world, then was lost, then exploded again in the Renaissance.
Things wear out and stories lose context, the cuisine gets adapted to the spices of the new world, and the struggles of the ancestral heroes were against dangers that perished long ago.
I don't think there's enough time for full history this side of eternity. My wife is writing her family history, and trying to get me to do the same. All summaries, without the flavor or texture of the original...
Parts of the post seem to conflate history with the past; they aren't really the same thing. The past is gone; history is stories about the past that are passed on.
Myself, I have spent a great deal of time in musty (digitized now, but I can still smell them) books detailing the minutiae of a particular bygone century. They are incredibly boring, those books, for the most part. I am of course spending (wasting?) my days looking for new (to historians) details on all aspects of those shamefully under-represented (in historical journals and monographs) hamsters.
But this newest paper will be it! I will finally demonstrate - once and for all! - to the WORLD (of historians) that hamsters were clearly more important to the development of early modern Western civilization (or at least to Lamarck's conceptualization of the transmutation of species and radical French politics) than they have ever imagined! Cabbages? Ptooie! Medieval holdovers, at best. Eternal (a relative term) fame and glory (in someone's footnotes) shall be mine!
Still, this summer I might do something actually worthwhile and write some family history to pass down to the next generation. If I can herd some of the aging cats into oral interviews. We'll see.
james, why are you writing summaries w/o the flavor or texture of the original? Are these just the stories of past relatives and you don't have the details to really tell the stories? I'm thinking about how to handle a situation like that myself, and I can't stand to write boring history.
My wife does a far better job of recalling the details that give the stories texture than I do. I wrote up a moderately dramatic incident the other day, and found that I had to go to google-street view to get the colors and the shapes. At the time of the incident I was trying hard to keep emotions out of my mind so I could concentrate on solutions--my daughter would have told a very different story.
I can "make up" appropriate details, but then that's not quite history.
Yeah, I guess that's just memory. Maybe you can ask your daughter for her memories of the event and synthesize yours and hers? Or anyone else who was there who is still around. Maybe talk about how or why the event was important? How it changed things, either materially or in perceptions? I dunno; like I said, I'm struggling with some of this as well, so if you have any ideas or find something that works, please pass it along.
I think that's how it is going to have to be.
On that trip we asked the kids to promise to keep a diary of what happened, since they would see different things than we did. "I'm tired and it's dark. I'll do it tomorrow."
They didn't, so now the official history is the one my wife and I wrote.
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