The study of history should be our preparation for understanding the present, rather than an escape from it.
I understood in a flash that I must keep my mind safe, whatever came next. I believe now that it was not only enormous luck that brought me this understanding the very first day, but also my habit of living closely with my own mind, alone with it while I practiced.
It was the beginning of that long bifurcation that became my life: Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish.
He was simply gone, and he took all our peace with him.
Obey and hate yourself, survive. Disobey, redeem yourself, perish.
Politicians who talk about purity usually end up deciding who is pure and who is not.
We went on growing food and eating and sleeping and I cooked for a big crowd here every day, all my family. What else could we do? You just go on, if you have to.
I’ve retrained myself since childhood into a kind of diligent goodwill toward life. Life and I became friends some years ago – not the sort of exciting friendship I longed for as a child, but a kindly truce, a pleasure in coming home.
To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history.
Didn’t Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn’t it expert in superstition?
Life and I became friends some years ago – not the sort of exciting friendship I longed for as a child, but a kindly truce, a pleasure in coming home every day to my apartment. I have a moment now and then – as I peel an orange and take it from kitchen counter to table – when I feel almost a pang of contentment, perhaps at that raw colour.
Pushing out through the doors, I experienced that mingled relief and disappointment one feels on departure from a great museum – relief at being returned to the familiar, less intense, more manageable world, and disappointment at that world’s lack of mystery.
There is a final resource to which I’ve resorted when necessary – the imagination. I have done this with judicious care, imagining for my reader only what I already know is very likely, and even then only when an informed speculation can set these documents into their proper context. Where I have been unable to explain events or motives, I have left them unexplained, out of respect for their hidden realities.
Together we will advance the historian’s work beyond anything the world has ever seen. There is no purity like the purity of the sufferings of history. You will have what every historian wants: history will be reality to you. We will wash our minds clean blood.
It’s the reward of the business, to look history in the eye and say, ‘I know who you are. You can’t fool me.
If I accepted one supernatural occurrence, I should certainly accept others; it was only logical.
I felt sure, glaring at the children as they settled onto the sand with their shovels, that these creatures were never threatened by the grimness of history, either. Then, looking down on their glossy heads, I realized that they were indeed threatened; they were simply unaware of it. We were all vulnerable.
Scholarship must go on. For good or for evil, but inevitably, in every field.
What did I know about the horrors of the past? Did they leak into rooms like mist, under doors? Or shatter windows and burst directly into one’s presence?
At first I thought I would study literature. Then, however, I realised I loved true stories even better than imaginary ones.
But I turned my feet away from the cheering pub – a mistake that has been the downfall of many a poor scholar – and towards Rare Books.