May 11, 2007

The Movement of History

by Cliopatria

"The movement of history is heavy, and slow. The movement of history always takes place behind one's back. As your gaze is fixed upon something immediately in front of you -- the object of your anger, for example -- history makes a slight, almost imperceptible slither, or shudder, in a direction of its own choice. The distinguishing mark of this direction is that it is not the one you had anticapted. How history does this is not known. Because history is made up of the will of all individuals taken together, because these oceans of individuals are mostly, or always, in conflict, the movement of history is at one and the same time tightly bound, and outrageous....Study of the previous behavior of history does not prepare one for these shifts, which are discomfiting in the extreme. Nothing prepares you."

Donald Barthelme, "The Angry Young Man," Guilty Pleasures (1974)

More Comments:

Jonathan Dresner - 5/10/2007

I put this on my final this year:

"Though we say that we cannot see the future, its conditions lie all around us. They are as if encrypted. We cannot read them because we lack the key (which will be in our hands only when it is too late to use it). But we see their coded fragments and must call them something. Many aspects of our own contemporary culture might be called premonitory shivers: panicky renderings of unreadable messages about the kind of society we are creating. Our dominating passion, after all, is to give life meaning, even if sometimes a hideous one." - Philip A. Kuhn, Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768, Harvard UP, 1990, p. 1.