My dear grandchild,
I’ve enjoyed the string of letters (which began here) that I’ve written to you about comparing the situation of the world before the First World War and now: I like to have an excuse to read (or re-read) things I otherwise wouldn’t. But I’ve also been uneasy the whole time, for a number of reasons.
My first source of unease, which I’ve alluded to in passing, is that I’m aware of at least some of the problems with the comparison, which in any case may seem to quickly come dated. “No, it’s not the First World War that’s a point of comparison between then and now, it’s the Second,” I can imagine someone saying, though I think the existence of a global Great Depression in the years before that war, for example, makes it different. Or that there’s a more valid parallel with the ancient Hittites, or the Tang Dynasty, or whatever. The point is that I’ve been aware of the limits of my skill and imagination.
A second source of unease is the prediction factor in making the comparison between 1914 and 2025: I’m suggesting that the world is on the brink of disaster. Which I believe to be true. But I don’t know whether that disaster will come in 2025, 2026, 2036, or whenever. What I do know is that people who have devoted themselves to the study of the past have a checkered record at best in predicting the future. And you can look pretty foolish pretty quickly when you try. But here I have to return to my core point: I’m less interested—and I hope you’re less interested—in whether I’m right or wrong (or how I’m right or wrong) than in offering you a shared perception of a world on the edge as an artifact for your consideration. What we believed may be more interesting or useful than if we were right.
My third and perhaps greatest source of unease is coming off as a useless crank. I can say with great confidence that the last thing you need is a grampa nattering on and on, before or beyond the grave, about some disaster that occurred in your youth that is either irrelevant now or one you know all too well and hardly need me to explain to you. Nor is it particularly helpful for me to wax rhapsodic about supposedly Good Old Days that are in any case out of reach. When I think of you as alive and abroad in the world—as I’m imagining you right now in the prime of your life, gazing out a window or lovingly at a child of your own—it will be as a person who embodies mysteries beyond my ken on the best of my days.
Finally, there’s a problem that has been nagging at me for many years now, and one where I’ve kinda felt like a prisoner of the specific occupational culture that made me. For four decades now, I have plied my trade as a professional historian, which is to say someone who has taught and written about the past for pay (much more the former than the latter). In my lifetime, the practice of history has been understood in terms of making arguments about the past. With rare exceptions, historians of my day did not discover the past, because it has been presumed as fairly well documented and understood (at least among historians themselves). Instead, they interpreted—or, more accurately, reinterpreted the past, sometimes by incorporating new information into the story, but typically using it to revise the prevailing narrative line. So it is that the recent profession of history has been a quintessentially postmodern enterprise: narratives, metanarratives, deconstructed narratives, and the like.
I have done this dozens of times in my own books, and have coached my students to practice this method more times than I can count, less because I’ve been interested in producing historians myself—I know of no one who has become one as a result of my tutelage—than because the practice of sizing up a situation is not in fact a bad skill for making one’s way in the world, at least among the elite that has been my job to reproduce.
But I’ve never been entirely happy with doing this. And I’m hoping, my dear grandchild, that you’ll be my ticket out.
What I’d like to do instead is use history—my understanding of the past, and my understanding of my life in the present before it became the past—as a form of testimony. It’s a matter of saying, “This is how it did look to me” rather than “This is how it should look to you.” There may be an inevitable element of the latter in the former, if for no other reason than I’m a creature of my time, whether I want to be or not. But it’s an offering I make mindful of the fallibility of my perception, and thus of its utility to you—or, at any rate, that its utility may take the form of an understanding I can scarcely imagine.
Of course, it’s distinctly possible that what I have to convey (I’m using the term “have” as both an offering and a matter of something I feel impelled to do) will be of no utility to you. That these words will die on the page, as it were. I know that’s possible, even likely. But this is the point where history truly becomes an act of faith, a will to believe that something, some tissue of comprehension or feeling, does animate the soul of this enterprise, and can be transplanted from generation to generation. Or, at any rate, can lie dormant before its resurrection in some transfigured form (in a vessel that may be different than words that get read).
But what kind of testimony will I offer you? In its most general sense, I’ve been thinking it should take the form of everyday experience, apprehended in both the most concrete sensory terms as well as the long-honed filter of historical experience—what I call “timefulness.” I’m still struggling to find the right containers for that, and in days to come, I’ll be experimenting a bit in the hope I can eventually graft these observations I make to you onto past efforts to do so. Again, child, I’m hoping you will point the way—that your future will be a way of ordering a past I can present to you.