In Paul Harding’s Pulitzer Prize winning debut 2009 novel Tinkers, a young man named George who is running away from home in the 1920s thinks briefly about his friend Ray’s father:
Ray Morrell’s father, who talked with a strange accent George had never heard and would never hear again, and who seemed to have stepped out of some bank of mist on the other side of which was, perfectly preserved - or, not even preserved but still actual - the previous century.
This is lush, almost transcendental prose, but it hits hard because it is true, not because it is beautiful. There are moments in one’s life when one sees, feels, or hears, a distant echo of the previous century. Sometimes one even gets a glimpse of something that came from even further back in the mists of time. The keening of the underwater hull of coastal shipwrecks that were broken upon the rocks of a new, non-European continent, in the late 1400s. I don’t mean to say History is the ghosts of sailors holding laterns. I mean to say the sense of stumbling across something old, something from a forgotten time made by men with forgotten names who worked in shipyards to provide for families now long dispersed and, yes, probably forgotten too.
The ticking of clocks over the centuries of civilization are one way of keeping time (if indeed time can be “kept” at all). For the person who is interested in things like that, these instances where the past rears its magnificent head, shows its ancient bearing and mien, these moments, are to be treasured. For the Historian, they are to be enjoyed…and then catalogued.
Relics of the former world are to be found all around us, in attics and in basements and in geological formations and great oceans and lost continents and lost cities.
Maybe one day you will wander into a shop and spot a strange hat once worn by a strange man who carried a pocket watch made in a European colonial state from 1902 that no longer exists (See also: Ceylon, or Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday). A man who carried a strange hat on his head but also carried in his head ideas about the world and maps of the world that would now seem so hopelessly outdated that to look upon this man’s archaic notions or cartographs would make the contemporary Historian, Geographer or Geologist laugh out loud and mutter something derisive.
One unfortunate fact one must accept is this: Historical artifacts are usually dull, not earth-shattering. It is only the cumulative effect of them that forms the shape of that that vanquished shadow world we call History.
History, to me, Real History, is a place no one who is presently alive has ever been to. As L.P. Hartley wrote “the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”
Peter Ackroyd, however, a man who sees a vast continuity amidst the vast shifts in England from an agrarian society, to a pastoral one, to a chivalric, warlike one - ever alert to Saxon and Viking raids - to a high medieval society governed by kings of various competence and capability, to an industrial Britain with the world’s largest blue water Navy and more overseas possessions than any other nation. As Ackroyd writes in Foundation:
From the beginning, we find evidence of a deep continuity that is the legacy of an unimaginably distant past. . . . The nation itself represents the nexus of custom with custom, the shifting patterns of habitual activity. This may not be a particularly exciting philosophy of history but it is important to avoid the myth of some fated or providential movement forward. Below the surface of events lies a deep, and almost geological, calm. . . . We still live deep in the past.
But is it we, or Ackroyd himself, who still live deep within this past. Ackroyd’s best book, London: The Biography, states this position with a stern flexing of stylistic muscle. This is what Ackroyd means when he says he seeks to restore “the poetry of the past:”
If you were to touch the plinth upon which the equestrian statue of King Charles I is placed, at Charing Cross, your fingers might rest upon the projecting fossils of sea lilies, starfish or sea urchins. There is a photograph of that statue taken in 1839; with its images of hackney cabs and small boys in stove-pipe hats the scene already seems remote, and yet how unimaginably distant lies the life of those tiny marine creatures. In the beginning was the sea. There was once a music-hall song entitled “Why Can’t We Have the Sea in London?,” but the question is redundant; the site of the capital, 50 million years before, was covered by great waters.
As I said before, there are only the artifacts, which cannot speak for themselves, and the stories, which can speak for themselves but come with the added complication of the flavor of the given storyteller’s way. His broth of plot and pause, how he orders the tale and arranges his characters. This is another strange and mysterious shadow world, one we call Authorship.
Where does Authorship begin and History end? The Historian is also an Author. You cannot be considered a historian if you do not publish books outlining your position. You can be a History Teacher, which is an important job, but you cannot be an author if you don’t have a bibliography of books trailing behind you like festive bunting. The woman who wrote The Guns of August was a Historian Author. Her work is still respected as an excellent contribution to the History of WWI. The Great War and Modern Memory, however, a once-highly respected book of literary criticism covering works written by WWI soldiers, written by a man who fought and survived WWI, is now thought to be
a superb study of the literature and language of the Great War and specifically the metaphors and myths by which it was waged. ... But the book is also a weak, often simplistic, account of almost everything before and after the war. It is great literary criticism and lousy history.
So Barbara W. Tuchman (The Guns of August) is a Historian first and Author second. Paul Fussell (The Great War and Modern Memory) is the reverse.
The Historian cannot help but write him or herself into history, first by claiming a perspective on it, an expertise of some kind, and then finally by becoming history themselves, their works of history becoming themselves historical artifacts. It is then that the Interdisciniplary Academic carefully - one hpes such work is not done in a desultory manner - arranges historical history books into the newer discipline of Historiography.
Historiography is the usually chronological study of how history is made, told, written, and understood. It is the study of historians themselves, their biases, their assumptions, their errors, their own personal dead ends, their own private Esperantos.1
Historiography can be every bit as rewarding and satisfying as the real capital H History, which is The Story of Us All and which lies forever out of our reach because to jam into one single volume every single human perspective and emotion that has ever existed, however ephemeral, is a task so impossible as to be funny to even try. It is not even daunting. It is ridiculously undoable. Will there always be something out of reach for anybody trying to understand something? Or will the precise exactness of science come to fall upon the humanities in a way that forever banishes uncertainty?
Toward the end of Paul Harding’s Tinkers, a son says to his dying father on the latter’s deathbed:
I was just thinking that I am not very many years old, but that I am a century wide. I think I have my literal age but am surrounded by a radius of years. I think that these years of days, this near century of years, is a gift from you. Thank you.
We are surrounded by ripples of time that ripple both outward and inward, and between each ripple are blank spots, question marks, uncertainties, unknowables, shadows and secret signs and lost languages. Are we poorer for having uncertainty in our lives?
I hope not. Uncertainty is how and where our humanity finds itself. All great acts began as uncertain half-formed notions or plans. It is what we do when we don't know what to do that shapes us.
See also: People, Wistfulness, Unnameable Feelings
Esperanto was an attempt to create an international language that could be spoken without the weight of bias and history. Created by the Warsaw-based ophthalmologist L. L. Zamenhof in 1887, who disliked how Latin was once the default language for Catholic liturgical services or how French was once the language of Court, even in officious marble-floored courts of the Russian Empire, intended Esperanto to be a universal second language for international communication, or “the international language.” Though a noble undertaking, there are less than 2 million people who understand and can speak Esperanto, and of that 2 million, only 1% are native speakers, though exactly where these 20,000 mythical creatures are born and taught the language is as utter a mystery to me as the whole of History itself. Who is teaching their children Esperanto in 2023? Who is speaking Esperanto in 2023? Anyhow, for a language that claimed to be above nationalism, it is odd that Esperanto has a flag: