History is Our Future

History is Our Future: the past is future, and vice-versa.

Morrow: What’s the matter, Sorrow? You have a face to match your name. I would think that you’d find nothing more refreshing than being on the open sea, away from all your cares at home.

Sorrow: I wanted to leave them behind, but they have traveled with me.

Morrow: How so?

Sorrow: This was supposed to be an easy, relaxing trip. The university invited me to travel around the Mediterranean with alumni and give a few lectures on the sites: tomorrow Rhodes, Syracuse a few days later. Instead I worry about many things.

Morrow: I’m sorry to hear this. Worry can be a burden, Dr. Faust!

Sorrow: Very funny. As if Goethe could have imagined the challenges of today!

Morrow: Didn’t he? The figure of Care says to the aging Faust: “When of him I take possession, / Then his whole world is lessened…. Be it joy or be it sorrow / He delays it to tomorrow, / Waiting for the future, ever, / Finding his fulfillment, never.”¹

Sorrow: Ha, leave it to you to find the apt quote. But still: who reads Goethe anymore? You sound quaint quoting him. That’s precisely my worry, Morrow. That historians belong to the past. The future has no need of us. Like history, we are disposable – we are now just cultural accoutrements that serve more for decoration than anything urgent, vital, or necessary.

Morrow: Why do you think this way?

Sorrow: Look simply at the numbers! Students major in history less and less. Our programs stand only in service of other departments: science, STEM, business. Colleagues – renowned colleagues, esteemed in their fields – retire without being replaced. Whole fields have vanished beneath the waves, becoming lost continents of learning. If we are fortunate, our books become wall decor, but remain largely unread.

Morrow: Wow, no wonder you’re depressed. Only don’t jump overboard just yet.

Sorrow: Don’t worry. I’m not about to dive to Atlantis.

Morrow: Let me put it to you another way. You like paradoxes, don’t you?

Sorrow: Very much! They can be among the highest forms of playful wisdom.

Morrow: Well, I have one for you.

Sorrow: You must be inspired by the sea air. Go ahead – I’m holding onto the railing.

Morrow: History is our future.

Sorrow: That’s a challenging riddle! How so, my sea-worthy philosopher?

Morrow: In two senses.

Sorrow: Two? I’m doubly intrigued.

Morrow: I thought it might take two shocks to rouse you from your doldrums. Here’s one sense. History is not just past. It lies in wait for us. History does not vanish when it disappears from view. It remains present in its absence, and future in its past. We are challenged to remember and recall what has been. What has been still is, and will be. Present care and concerns distract us from discovering the presence of the past.

 Sorrow. Very good and clever, Morrow! All this may be true – I’m inclined to agree with you – but this does not raise my spirits. I say this because my students and yours, and their parents, and the world we live in, turn their backs to this fact or idea. What you’re saying is that history may be our future, but need not be. No one believes the old adage anymore, that one who forgets the past is condemned to repeat it. To believe that, you’d have to read history!

Morrow: I see that Care has a good hold on you. But that only confirms the second sense of why history is our future.

Sorrow: Go ahead, then.

Morrow: You have noted that the first meaning expresses potential – history lies in wait for us. How rich is that potential! Let me turn now to something even more basic – history is the medium of truth. Because we have been, are, and shall be rooted in history. You are worried about your legacy: you are thinking about the future past, of what will be remembered in time to come. We live in history, our words are born from history, we desire to know this history even now by researching our DNA. And so all our thinking and discussing of the future comes out from the past, and as we travel to our destination – be it Rhodes, Syracuse, or Ithaka – we learn who we are by holding near where we have been. In the end, we return home.

Sorrow: Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Morrow: Not only that. You remember the skeleton in the tomb under Masaccio’s Trinity, declaring, “What you are, I once was; and what I am now, you will be.”

Masaccio, Trinity, detail

Sorrow: A pretty gloomy vision! How is this helpful?

Morrow: By bringing our minds to what we create every day: which is history and comes from history. Our expectations are built upon the past, and not only the past twenty-four hours. I have another example. I’m going to draw you the Chinese character for “tree”: 木

Sorrow: OK. I know you’ve been studying this. What of it?

Morrow: Here is the character now for “foundation or origin”: you can see that is built upon that of “tree”: 本. Add the character for “person” (人) and you have the character for “one’s self”: 本人.

So one’s self is one’s origin, and the origin itself has an organic quality, one with deep roots that grow over time. You can see this in the character for “not yet” (未), which is shy of the full growth found in the one for “end”: 末. The character for “future” (未來) combines “not yet” with the character for “to come.” All remind us of origin and foundation. History is the source of one’s self, which is also the source of what is to come.

Sorrow: A Chinese study on the Mediterranean. We are between East and West.

Morrow: And between sunrise and sunset, departure and arrival.

Caspar David Friedrich, Winter Landscape