History is rejuvenation

History is rejuvenation: vital history for the ages.

Touchstone: hello, Jaques: still feeling down?

Jaques: yes, indeed. I can’t seem to shake this melancholy. I’m tired, feel out of sorts all the time.

Touchstone: sleeping well?

Jaques: too much.

Touchstone: eating.

Jaques: the same.

Touchstone: we can’t live normal lives at the moment, masked and muzzled.

Jaques: there is something to that. Yet work and life are out of balance, and the very things that used to bring me joy now seem stale and worn out, without purpose, or at most with little.

Touchstone: when at most they bring little, that’s a problem. What about your studies?

Jaques: you mean of my research into history?

Touchstone: you used to delight in reading and speaking about it, bringing to life even the suffering of the past, to the point that your joy, so often expressing these pains, brought us to tears. You were one who laughed loudly with and at life, like good old Democritus, turning the rest of us into a mournful choir of his companion Heraclitus.

Bust of Heraclitus at https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0002557.html

Bust of Democritus at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Democritus2.jpg

Jaques: now you’re joking.

Touchstone: but poorly: you’re not laughing.

Jaques: there’s less now than ever to laugh about.

Touchstone: at least you’re remaining a historian! Why, good professor? What are the reasons for this?

Jaques: like students, I speak in fragments: brokenness, loneliness, lack of energy, feeling dispirited, lifeless.

Touchstone: you have made a serious laundry list. History used to be your home and now you are sounding out of doors and in the rain.

Jaques: Exactly: an atmosphere of alienation and homelessness, disorientation, surrounds everything I do and everyone I know.

Touchstone: this would get old very quickly, if it were not an old problem.

Jacques: again, with the jokes! You’re not exactly making me feel any better.

Touchstone: what I’m thinking about is “History may be servitude / History may be freedom.” The feeling of disorientation and estrangement is as old as Odysseus, cast about by Poseidon on his way home from Troy, meeting strange people in strange lands. In our more modern times, more oblivious to myth, alienation became the muse for Marx; and Heidegger, inspired by Nietzsche, pondered more deeply humanity’s homelessness.

Jaques: more deeply indeed! Well, my double-faced friend, you move quickly from comedy to tragedy, from jesting to seriousness.

Touchstone: then let me quote W.C. Fields: “comedy is tragedy happening to somebody else.” But seriously, comedy is born from suffering, only observes it from another perspective. But let’s talk about you: why the lethargy?

Jaques: what use is my work? Do I do it simply to earn my living; do I do it to impress others? Is it simply a game with no purpose? Who cares about history anyway? Certainly not students, focused on their careers; not parents, seeking a return on their investments; not college administrators, charting a three-year plan to their next promotion. But I wonder even about myself.

Touchstone: so you are living a crisis, a crisis with two legs. No wonder you are feeling tired, when these legs are weak. You are yoked by your experiences, suffering under the memory of discouragement.

Jaques: but that is the fashion today. We want to pore over failure, defeat, servitude, injustice, oppression.

Touchstone: these are all critical topics.

Jaques: but a challenge!

Touchstone: as the ancients said, history is the teacher of life, showing you examples to follow, examples to avoid.

Jaques: there is a double problem, I think.

Touchstone: what is that?

Jaques: looking at past misery can be enervating. It heightens our feeling for our own. But the cost comes also in the actual looking. Are we truly looking, or only glancing for a moment, with less attention span than that of a goldfish? We assume the past rather than study it. We pursue our own biases, and then fleetingly, with scarce attention even to grammar.

Touchstone: we are a legion of forgetful historians! I like the irony.

Jaques: but’s true. We assume we know the past, and its imprint on the present, but often it’s reversed. We want the past to confirm our present preoccupations and prejudices. I think it remains distant from us, a foreign land. Our concentration is scattered.

Touchstone: it’s no wonder you’re tired, lost at sea, chasing and being chased, forgetful of what’s in front on you.

Jaques: not at all: I remain fixed on the present.

Touchstone: you think you are in the present, but you are not here.

Jaques: I thought you were Democritus, not Heraclitus. Are you now telling me I am stepping into the same river twice, and yet also I am not?

Touchstone: In a way, yes. Only you don’t even know your feet are wet. You think you are focused on the present, but your mind is actually elsewhere. If you were truly mindful of this present moment, then you would sense the river of time itself: past and future are there in the present.

Jaques: more riddles! I had thought I understood the ages of life and history.

Touchstone: didn’t you say you were distracted and forgetful?

Jaques: yes – if you say so.

Touchstone: nicely done! A thoughtful monk once said, “forgetfulness is the absence of mindfulness.” And if we genuinely mind the present moment, we see how everything is interconnected. You are here because of your past; I am here because of mine. This place, this garden, has its roots deep in the ground of history, and we are living history from the words we first exchanged. Our words, each word, has its history, from the time we were born and heard language, through the pages we have read, and long before. Our moment – now – contains all this history, and all this energy.

Jaques: I’m listening.

Touchstone: why did you say that?

Jaques: what do you mean? It simply came to mind.

Touchstone: why did it come to mind?

Jaques: it might have been a polite convention of something to say.

Touchstone: that’s not like you.

Jaques: fair enough. I said it because it was true. Your words, I guess, opened up this thought, and I expressed it.

Touchstone: And even so the present opens to the future. As every moment now finds roots in the past, so too does it listen to the future, and the future is responding to it. The future is also present.

Jaques: again, you’re getting deep into this river, but I’m swimming with you.

Touchstone: how could it not be? When old man Herodotus spoke of recording events lest they slip the bonds of memory, he was imagining future readers by his side.

Jaques: yes, there is something inherently dynamic about that first sentence in the Histories: the deeds he records –genómena – are moments of growth; and he wants to delay their increasing evanescence – esdítala génetai – over time.

Touchstone: I knew I could awaken the scholar in you!

Jaques: I’m feeling a bit better. And so his great successor as an historian, Thucydides, could claim to have written his work “for all time”: aieì: “My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.”

^{1. Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, trans. R. Warner, 1.24.↩}