Your history.
I was thinking today about repetition, about the past, about writing something – I was thinking about what Ralph Waldo Emerson said about history: he believed that history is one of the most important facets of living a whole life. We are evolved beings, and we have a memory because our past helps us to survive.
He spoke of how he could get lost in history texts, find himself fighting alongside Alexander the Great and Napoleon, how he could see history for his history. He believed that we must be able to relate, because the past has so much to teach us about here and now, that the mistakes you read about in books could be yours if you don’t make them yours through imagination.
I think he’s wrong.
There’s a good reason we don’t internalize our own mistakes, why we hear health warnings and sob stories and we smoke and drink and ruin ourselves - diatribes about the fall of civilizations and yet we walk the same path. Why we repeat our mistakes knowing full well. The reason is everything changes sometime, and maybe it’s this time.
posted by Anacryon at 8:52 PM
2 Comments:
I wonder about that. It seems to me that while things do change, the change is only a change in a particular context, i.e. historical context. We respond to our experiences, philosophers respond to other philosophers who respond to other philosophers (some say that philosophy can be summed up in Aristotle and everybody else who responded to Aristotle).
I respond to my parents and familial past. If I ever get married and have kids, I will raise them in someways similarly in MANY ways differently. There will be change. We are not stuck in the past, but I think we repond to it, even if it is an utter rejection.
I wonder about that. It seems to me that even if I reject history, even that is a response to it. If history is in some sense being in time, then we are all affected. Canada, the US are both here because of a particular history. I do not think we can escape the grasp of history -as much as I would like to.
Of course, seeing how Alexander relates to all this, that is a bit more tricky.
Post a Comment
<< Home