history

I had something of a revelation about the purpose of history. The subject is not the dusty old past. It is the present. History is composed of stories about the dead and gone. There are great tales and mundane details supposedly comprising a tapestry of how people (or other things) lived. Sometimes this is reasonably successful at telling a story. But it is only a story. Very rarely is history a glimpse into how those things, even those simple and mundane things, made people feel or think. And usually such glimpses are told in their own stories; in letters or books or hieroglyphs.
What history really says is something about us. The people now. The living. What is it that we value, what is it that we feel. We project ourselves into that distant world and try to imagine what it would be like for ourselves. How would we fare? We often imagine that our technology or our culture is such of an advancement that we would fare well. We can see this pattern in the 'sordid' past by looking at things like Jefferson's affair with a slave girl. People look at such things with a curious eye, as though it means something powerful and painful. Perhaps it did at the time. But I doubt it. It looks to me like the behavior of powerful or intelligent men in their difficulty with sexual fidelity (or their need for such exercise). And little more than that. Even this viewpoint is merely that; a view from the present. Humans change, how our behaviors are viewed or interpreted matters greatly over time. But we assume they're essentially universals that can be communed with over history. It does not appear this is so. Otherwise people wouldn't have so much trouble understanding the Bible or the Qo'ran as interpretative works of fiction interposed over meaningful stories. The one is written hundreds of years later, and edited carefully by the powerful. The other is essentially edited by the historical events of the time, comprising a story of it's own with the position that prophetic things were happening. Both seem to have been essential tools in their day, codified processes of thought and feeling that have since passed their usefulness or have since been largely forgotten. The imprecision with which we use words to say what we mean or feel has long annoyed me. Sometimes all it takes is a look and we understand someone (or something) completely. But history doesn't allow those understanding looks. All we can do is guess at what people meant. And it is those guesses that say things about the present.
Perhaps in a way it says things about how we would like the future to look as well, much as often people of the past commented on dreams or aspirations of their own. I think it often says that people have changed. But in a way, sometimes the way we approach problems has not. The real use and function of history, the way I thought we were to use it, was to provide those glimpses into the past. It attempts to put to word or portray a view of the past, the dead and gone. And we, despite our best efforts to look forward, desire in a way to be connected with our past. We can understand that in our future is a time where we ourselves will be gone, or at least no longer matter. We want desperately for there to be a way to communicate who we were. Why was it that we did things? What was it we were doing? How the hell did we do that? And so on. Unfortunately we can't quite do it. When a story or book is composed, it says what the reader wants it to. Never quite what the author wanted to say. With a good story, that's often enough, as the author secretly (I think) wants the readers to think on anything. We would think it would be different for factual history. But it is often not the case. It says what we want it to, perhaps in way because that's what they wanted to do as well.