These Walls Talk, Part One

The essential meaning and value of the study of history

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

Why not step back for a while from the incessant yammer of the political. I want to take a deep dive.

Think of tree roots.  They reach out, grasping, penetrating their environment.  They become part of an ecosystem.  So, I suggest, does the human self.  We become part of clusters of groups and systems, as well as ideas and dreams. They are our reality, by which we see and feel and think. By movement outward we become more than we ever could as solitary. It feels as if it is our natural state of being. What the essense of life “intends” for all that lives.

The extent and nature of this form of growth and enlargement is the subject matter of sociology and anthropology.  A culture or a society (choose your label) is an extension and enlargement of many selves in dynamic tension with each other within the universe of life.  

But our lives are not just anchored to place. The greater mystery is change, our relationship to time. We live indeed within the moment. Often this is expressed and studied as society, but it is also nature.  We ARE “social” in all its meanings.  One can say we are never otherwise. As the poet Archibald Macleish in his play JB wrote, perhaps we would not be here or have a here in which to be, “except for the little green leaves in the wood / And the wind on the water."

But as well, and in much the same way we live as part of something that we call “history.”

We make, we are, we become history.  It is a river we enter and change as it changes us.  And it is as important to understand our place in time as it is to understand our place this moment of time. 

When are able to see ourselves as part of the social world, we gain freedom of action.  So it is with an understanding our place in the flow of time. 

But how do we come upon this understanding?  It seems natural to be a student of moment. We can study society by direct observation and action.  We can observe ourselves as interactive parts of various social wholes.  With history it is different.  We need ways to view ourselves in the patterns of time.  Narratives help.  Letters, documents, photographs help.  But they are outside ourselves. Such understanding needs to be felt as well as known. 

We do have, however, resources that are an important aid in this process, resources that that we often discount, even actively destroy.  They are the physical structures of the past.  Not empty and derelict, but still alive and in a manner, breathing. 

Enter a 19^th century home that has been restored to its authentic embodiment of that time and place.  Enter and you are stepping into time.  You are between moments.   You hold place in tension in the present and the past. 

You are then as well as now. You are a time traveler. Then, in beliefs, in hopes, in contentment.  You experience what you have you retained; abandoned; lost again and again and found in new forms and expressions. 

Those shadowy figures just beyond normal sensory vision?  They are you, your past and unequivocally part of your present and future.  That is to say that we are as much part of the past as we are of the present.  We act within history as we act within society.  And in both cases, we either act out of ignorance or knowledge, with freedom or blindness.

More now than ever, it seems to me, we need such knowledge.  The ancients called it wisdom. 

I write this as a member of an organization that is dedicated to historic preservation and owns a 19th century home.  It retains the furnishings and many of the physical reminders of the 1880s.  I’ve written several columns for the local newspaper describing how the “walls talk.”  I plan in my next blog to share two of these with you. 

 

We can dig a little further into the philosophical grounds for some of these insights if you wish in the commentk section. I thank John Ryder for some of these insights, but please do not think less of him for my failure to make them clearer.