[lit-ideas] Re: One Damn Thing After Another
- From: David Ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 11:12:30 -0700
On Apr 24, 2014, at 10:49 AM, Lawrence Helm wrote:
> Christopher Dawson on page 16 of The Making of Europe, writes,
>
> ". . . it is not the 'easy' periods of history that are the most worth
> studying.
>
I wonder what he had in mind. I'm guessing that by "easy" he meant "likely to
have been on a school curriculum and therefore somewhat familiar." But who
knows about the war between Swedes and Dutch settlers in the first American
colonies? Is it easy to imagine a Swedish settler's view of a) Native
Americans and b) Dutch rivals?
> One of the great merits of history is that it takes us out of ourselves --
> away from obvious and accepted facts -- and discovers a reality that would
> otherwise be unknown to us. There is a real value in steeping our minds in
> an age entirely different to that which we know: a world different, but no
> less real -- indeed more real, for what we call 'the modern world' is the
> world of a generation, while a culture like that of the Byzantine or the
> Carolingian world has a life of centuries."
>
I agree with these statements, but I'd argue that most past world are "unknown"
to even well-read people; we have only vicarious experience of them. The past
is a foreign country that occasionally can seem familiar. To demonstrate
strangeness and distance to students, I often use Robert Darnton's essay on
"The Great Cat Massacre," the first in a book with that title.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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