1, 2

I just watched A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake (2000) last night. At one point in the documentary, Nick’s sister recounts a story of how she was once mean to him in elementary school. This incident stuck with her her whole life, and she apologized to him later in life, by which point he, of course, didn’t recall the incident at all.

Is history, our own and our world’s, useful if it is not given to us as lessons? When it is presented that way, that means that someone’s writing the lessons, and someone else’s lessons may not be the same as mine, so why should I have to listen to theirs? But part of the point of learning your society’s history or reviewing your own, supposedly (we are told), is to learn from past mistakes. Society’s histories, stories, legends, and mythologies are meant to inculcate the mores of society on us. Is this wrong?

Additionally, if history is not given to us as narrative (and stories tend to have implied heroes and villains, beginnings and endings) would it be at all interesting? If we are just presented with the facts, will we bother to pay attention long enough to draw our own conclusions? And if our own conclusions are different from the majority’s, are they valid? If we look at our own past as facts, and not narrative, can we say how we reached this point? Can we exist without a plot line?

Of course to everything and nothing, but it’s always more complicated than that, isn’t it?

This entry was posted on December 22, 2008 and is filed under history/memory, topics.