History

From The Book of Records:

"Time never goes missing," Bento insisted. "I think the structure of reality can be no other way. Therefore to glimpse reality as best we can is the root of true happiness."

Dad adjusted his blankets. He said that forgetting was also a necessity. "What's the use of passing on a history like mine, for instance? It would only break my daughter's heart."

Bento considered this. ... "One way or another," Bento said to my father, "your child inherits your life, so let her inherit a true thing not a false thing. Isn't that the very least a father should do?"

Comment: with the mention of forgetting here, this makes me think of Nietzsche. Come back maybe and flesh this out a bit.

"In Florence we have too much history. In America you are so free, free--oh, it is wonderful! Here if we move a stone in the street, who comes? The commission on antiquities, the scholars of the middle ages, priests, professors, committees of everything, saying, 'Do not move it. No, you cannot move it.' And even if you say, 'But it has just this minute fallen on my foot,' they show you no pity. In Rome they are even worse."

-- Signor Naccarelli in Elizabeth Spencer, The Light in the Piazza, Chapter V, p. 321 in the LOA edition.

"He fished out a date from his cup, chewed it dejectedly and spat the seed out the window. We watched it shoot into the air and begin to fall. I wanted to tell him that a big melon and a tiny seed, flung into a canyon, would both hit terminal velocity, and once that happened, they would fall at exactly the same speed as if they were holding hands. Maybe an event and its telling met in a similar way, touching on the long descent. Could something ten million years old fall into step with something ten seconds old, if they both hit terminal velocity and aged through space together?"

-- Madeleine Thien, The Book of Records, Chapter 4

In Pierce v United States (1920), Louis Brandeis connected the need to re-interpret history to the fact that causes are never singular. His interest here is, in part, the impossibility of assessing the absolute truth value of historical statements to the extent that would be reasonable to regulate (if indeed regulation is reasonable).

The cause of a war -- as of most human action -- is not single. War is ordinarily the result of many cooperating causes, many different conditions, acts, and motives. Historians rarely agree in their judgment as to what was the determining factor in a particular war, even when they write under circumstances where detachment and the availability of evidence from all sources minimizes both prejudice and other sources of error; for individuals, and classes of individuals, attach significance to those things which are significant to them, and, as the contributing causes cannot be subjected, like a chemical combination in a test tube, to qualitative and quantitative analysis, so as to weigh and value the various elements, the historians differ necessarily in their judgments. One finds the determining cause of war in a great man; another in an idea, a belief, an economic necessity, a trade advantage, a sinister machination, or an accident. It is for this reason largely that men seek to interpret anew in each age, and often with each new generation, the important events in the world's history.

At first this seems mainly about causation:

• Historical causation is not singular. Events have many causes.
• Historians disagree in the "determining factor" of an event, even with the best available methods and sources.
• So reinterpretation follows.

But note that middle sentence:

for individuals, and classes of individuals, attach significance to those things which are significant to them, and, as the contributing causes cannot be subjected, like a chemical combination in a test tube, to qualitative and quantitative analysis, so as to weigh and value the various elements, the historians differ necessarily in their judgments

This is not just about causation, then, but also about the inescapability of human perspective, of subjectivity. Interpretation will always reflect the particular positions of both individuals and groups. The neutral, objective interpretation is not just difficult but impossible.

(This reminds me of Becker -- will come back to add and compare later.)