A lifelong love affair

I fell in love with history on the same day as, though for reasons unconnected to, Richard Nixon's resignation from the White House. (Or, rather, it was reading about history that I fell in love with; the actual content of history, goodness knows, often has little "lovable" about it.) On August 9, 1974, finished (or bored) with my schoolwork and having nothing else to do, I picked up volume "C" of the World Book Encyclopedia and started browsing through it; within minutes, I was absorbed in the entry about the American Civil War. For the next two or three years I read every book I could find on the war, culminating in Shelby Foote's magnificent trilogy. Gradually, my historical interests expanded -- chronologically, geographically, thematically. While I cannot claim to be equally fascinated by every country, every era, every facet of the human experience (business and economics leave me especially uncaptivated), my interests are broad enough to preclude me from joining the ranks of the dryasdust pedants (in many disciplines besides history, of course) who have made a career (if little else) out of penning monographs that compete with each other to see which can gather the most dust on the most library shelves in the least amount of time. For better or worse, that is one competition I have neither the temperament nor the credentials to enter. More a generalist than a specialist, and more an autodidact than a creature of academe, I read whatever I think will add to my overall knowledge of the human race -- hopefully in at least a mildly felicitous fashion.

And what do I find so absorbing about history? Well, in the first place, it tells a story, a story complete with plot, setting, atmosphere, characters (even if those characters be inanimate objects like "love" or "violence" or "progress"). Focusing on people "in action," as it were, history also allows us to assess human nature on the basis of concrete observations and (David Hume notwithstanding) more or less "objective" realities. That the average human being (i.e., 99.9% of the race) has little inclination and less ability to make such assessments is itself a conclusion to be drawn from study of human history -- as is humanity's almost habitual incapacity to derive the proper lessons from the past. (And yes, these generalizations on my part are themselves open to dispute -- but only by those whose historical knowledge is limited to what they've read in the encyclopedia, or Sunday newspaper supplements, or recent monographs devoted to their particular field of expertise).

Last but not least, history offers a never-ending source of antidotes to counter the belief that we live live in either the best or the worst of all possible worlds. However great or awful today may seem, rest assured that there's always been a yesterday even more so.