The Thing About History

 

The thing about history is, there's just so much of it.

The closing shot of Gangs of New York shows what I mean by that: after having become so engrossed in the details of the story and people, in the minutiae of moments, the view zooms out from New York's 1863 skyline "changing in a time-lapse over the next 140 years, as modern Manhattan is built, from the Brooklyn Bridge to the World Trade Center, and the cemetery becomes overgrown and forgotten."

So much history packed into that tiny area of a single city through a single person's first 20 or so years of life. Then it's gone and forgotten. 

The worst bit about this is, it's not only gone and forgotten, but never to be remembered again. Ever.  Most anyone looking back a hundred and forty years from now won't see anything of most of what was to me the texture and color of my life and the world around me.

All that history, lost.

When I was in my early twenties, I started enjoying reading history for the first time in my life. And almost right away, as I read more and more, I encountered a phenomenon I'll call the secret doorway backward. The more I learned about any particular past society or culture or race or ethnic group or tribe, I found that they had a tradition, within their group, about some distant time in their own past. 

With any group of humans, in any time, a close look at their history showed that they too looked back into an even more distant, ancient history.

The reason this doorway backward is secret, is that it doesn't appear when history of a group is too general - when it doesn't dig into the group's own history. But once you start reading more closely, then there it is.

For instance, the Navajo people of North America, who flourished in the southwest beginning about 800 years ago, attributed ancient ruins in the area to the Anasazi, which means the ancient ones.

In the Atlas Mountains of present day Morocco, the local inhabitants of the area surrounding the 1,500 years-since ruined Roman post town of Volubilis called the last remaining buildings The Pharoah's Castle, because they believed the Egyptians built them long ago.

Plato tells the story of Solon visiting Egypt, and the Egyptian priest laughing at Solon for thinking the Hellenes had an ancient history.

"On one occasion, wishing to draw the Egyptians on to speak of antiquity, Solon began to tell about the most ancient things in [the Hellene's] part of the world-about Phoroneus, who is called "the first man," and about Niobe; and after the Deluge, of the survival of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their descendants, and reckoning up the dates, tried to compute how many years ago the events of which he was speaking happened. Thereupon one of the priests, who was of a very great age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are never anything but children, and there is not an old man among you. Solon in return asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age.”

This recurrence of the appearance of the secret doorway back in time only happens in written, rather than artifactual, history. That is, from the inside rather than from the outside. The artifactual history doesn't show the breaks, the horizons, between human ages/epochs/minds at the same place and time as the textual histories do, because the textual histories display the consciousness of that view - the view from the inside.

Once I experienced this passage back, up to and through that secret doorway, I found more of them, and more readily, and with just as much, and then more, appreciation as the first, and always with an increase in awareness of the expanse of human consciousness.