It’s early Saturday morning and I’m driving through history on my way to history. Like the hills I’m traveling through, the rain ebbs and flows in calm undulating waves.
“Calm” and “undulating” might not go together at first glance but think of sinusoidal waves. They move up and down with precise regularity. That regularity equates to calmness. The “up and down” represents “undulation” defined.
Such is the role of the historian, who commands the log of the human ship through waves of foible fads, ever trying to keep it calm and undamaged, despite its erratic and often misguided crew.
“Memory, thy name be frailty.” The metaphor of this butchered Shakespearian quote suggests the theme of this essay. It also represents the burden of the historian.Continue Reading “The Role Of The Historian”
Age Matters Less When You’re Old Enough to Know Better
But speaking of those formative teenage years, remember when you were a senior in high school? You might have had a few junior friends. You barely acknowledged the sophomores. And, as for the freshmen… did your high school even have a freshman class? Who knew? Back then, who cared?
Today, it doesn’t matter what class they were in; if they were in high school at the same time you were, they were all your age. At this point, numbers simply have no basis in reality. Age matters less as shared time rewrites the math. Age gaps that felt vast in your youth offer but Continue Reading “Age Matters Less When You’re Old Enough to Know Better”