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hawkwing_lb) wrote2009-12-29 12:08 am
hawkwing_lb) wrote2009-12-29 12:08 am
Entry tags:
Books 2009: enter sympathetically into the alien and sometimes repugnant minds of rival thinkers
Books 2009: 108-109
108. C.E. Murphy, Walking Dead.
Joanne Walker, police detective and shaman, is made of snark. This is a kind of fantastic book, funny and full of action. And it has the cauldron of Matholwch. And zombies.
So. Funny.
non-fiction
109. Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, London, 1997.
I will confess that I was supposed to read this book three years ago, and I'm kind of glad I only read it now. There is much in it I wouldn't have appreciated if I hadn't been reading it in the shadow of my own poor attempt to write history in the form of my thesis.
I have a number of arguments with it, but, it seems, that's its point. Evans mounts a defence of the idea that it is possible to write history, raising a vigorous argument against hyper-relativity. He has interesting things to say about causation, the history of historiography, the moral component to history, and the limits of objectivity. He's also quite readable, even if I suspect many of the "post-modernists" against whom he argues would probably disagree with his conclusions.
While Evans defends the idea that history can be written, however, he fails to advance an argument for why it should be. That seems to be left up to a quote from G.M. Trevelyan, which captures the spirit of historical enquiry in poetic 19th-century prose:
"That which compells the historian... is the ardour of his own curiosity to know what really happened long ago in that land of mystery which we call the past... It haunts him with a passion of terrible potency, because it is poetic. The dead were, and are not.Their place knows them no more, and is ours today. Yet they were once as real as we, and we shall tomorrow be shadows like them... The poetry of history lies in the fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow."
I've had this argument before, against scientists and business-oriented types who see only that the benefits of historical enquiry cannot be quantified in terms of value, and create a false dichotomy which opposes function to aesthetics. Aesthetics does too have a function in and of itself, and history is a discipline which relies on aesthetics, on the poetic, to justify itself. We do it because it's the right thing to do: it's right to remember what has gone before, to preserve some candle-flicker trace of the hundred billion uncounted dead.
To me, the value of history lies in empathy. In what we learn from it about others, and ourselves. History is a branch of the tree of literature, which has its basis in recoverable truth. For certain values of truth. And it's worth doing, and it's worth doing right, because human life is terribly brief, and terribly fragile, and if we do not remember, who will remember us?
My biases, let me show you them.
I have been to town. I'm still gloating over my purchases, which include - I have coveted it for months! - Sidebotham et al's The Red Land: An Illustrated Archaeology of Egypt's Eastern Desert, a book on Tamerlane, a book on the Great Fire of London, the collection poems of Constantine Cavafy in English and Greek, and - sadly, unavoidably necessary - Teach Yourself German.
Bookses!
I also now have a moleskine notebook of my very own to do duty as a diary in the New Year, and Mark Knopfler's Sailing to Philadelphia. I feel... smug. Smug is a good word. Also satisfied.
Now, sadly, it's time for thesis, damnit.
108. C.E. Murphy, Walking Dead.
Joanne Walker, police detective and shaman, is made of snark. This is a kind of fantastic book, funny and full of action. And it has the cauldron of Matholwch. And zombies.
So. Funny.
non-fiction
109. Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History, London, 1997.
I will confess that I was supposed to read this book three years ago, and I'm kind of glad I only read it now. There is much in it I wouldn't have appreciated if I hadn't been reading it in the shadow of my own poor attempt to write history in the form of my thesis.
I have a number of arguments with it, but, it seems, that's its point. Evans mounts a defence of the idea that it is possible to write history, raising a vigorous argument against hyper-relativity. He has interesting things to say about causation, the history of historiography, the moral component to history, and the limits of objectivity. He's also quite readable, even if I suspect many of the "post-modernists" against whom he argues would probably disagree with his conclusions.
While Evans defends the idea that history can be written, however, he fails to advance an argument for why it should be. That seems to be left up to a quote from G.M. Trevelyan, which captures the spirit of historical enquiry in poetic 19th-century prose:
"That which compells the historian... is the ardour of his own curiosity to know what really happened long ago in that land of mystery which we call the past... It haunts him with a passion of terrible potency, because it is poetic. The dead were, and are not.Their place knows them no more, and is ours today. Yet they were once as real as we, and we shall tomorrow be shadows like them... The poetry of history lies in the fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow."
I've had this argument before, against scientists and business-oriented types who see only that the benefits of historical enquiry cannot be quantified in terms of value, and create a false dichotomy which opposes function to aesthetics. Aesthetics does too have a function in and of itself, and history is a discipline which relies on aesthetics, on the poetic, to justify itself. We do it because it's the right thing to do: it's right to remember what has gone before, to preserve some candle-flicker trace of the hundred billion uncounted dead.
To me, the value of history lies in empathy. In what we learn from it about others, and ourselves. History is a branch of the tree of literature, which has its basis in recoverable truth. For certain values of truth. And it's worth doing, and it's worth doing right, because human life is terribly brief, and terribly fragile, and if we do not remember, who will remember us?
My biases, let me show you them.
I have been to town. I'm still gloating over my purchases, which include - I have coveted it for months! - Sidebotham et al's The Red Land: An Illustrated Archaeology of Egypt's Eastern Desert, a book on Tamerlane, a book on the Great Fire of London, the collection poems of Constantine Cavafy in English and Greek, and - sadly, unavoidably necessary - Teach Yourself German.
Bookses!
I also now have a moleskine notebook of my very own to do duty as a diary in the New Year, and Mark Knopfler's Sailing to Philadelphia. I feel... smug. Smug is a good word. Also satisfied.
Now, sadly, it's time for thesis, damnit.