History Viewed from a River
Henry David Thoreau
[Reprinted from Fragments, April-June, 1967. The
selection is from his first book,
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published in 1849]
WE SHOULD READ history as little critically as we consider the
landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and various
lights and shades which the intervening spaces create, than by its
groundwork and composition. It is the morning now turned evening and
seen in the west, -- the same sun, but a new light and atmosphere. Its
beauty is like the sunset; not a fresco painting on a wall, flat and
bounded, but fluctuates as the face of the landscape from morning to
evening. What is of moment is its hue and color. Time hides no
treasures; we want not its then, but its now. We do not complain that
the mountains in the horizon are blue and indistinct; they are the
more like the heavens.
Of what moment are facts that can he lost, -- which need to be
commemorated? The monument of death will outlast the memory of the
dead. The pyramids do not tell us the tale that was confided to them;
the living fact commemorates itself. Why look in the dark for light?
Strictly speaking, the historical societies have not recovered one
fact from oblivion, but are themselves, instead of the fact, that is
lost. The researcher is more memorable than the researched. The crowd
stood admiring the mist and the dim outline of the trees seen through
it, when one of their number advanced to explore the phenomenon, and
with fresh admiration all eyes were turned on his dimly retreating
figure. It is astonishing with how little cooperation of the societies
the past is remembered. Its story has indeed had another muse than has
been assigned to it. There is a good instance of the manner in which
all history began, in Alwakidis' Arabian Chronicle: "I
was informed by Ahmed Almatin Aljorhami, who had it from Saiph Ebn
Kais Alamiri, who had it from Saiph Ebn Fabalah Alchatquarmi, who had
it from Thabet Ebn Alkamah, who said he was present at the action."
These fathers of history were not anxious to preserve, but to learn
the fact; and hence it was not forgotten. Critical acumen is exerted
in vain to uncover the past; the past cannot be presented;
we cannot know what we are not. But one veil hangs over past, present,
and future, and it is the province of the historian to find out, not
what was, but what is. Where a battle has been fought, you will find
nothing but the bones of men and beasts; where a battle is being
fought, there are hearts beating. We will sit on a mound and muse, and
not try to make these skeletons stand on their legs again. Does Nature
remember, think you, that they were men, or not rather that
they are bones?
Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It
is written as if the spectator should, be thinking of the backside of
the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead
would be his 'readers, and wished to detail to them their own
experience. Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through
the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the works behind, as they are
battered down by the encroachments of time; but while they loiter,
they and their works both fall a prey to the arch enemy. History has
neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the
modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which
natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the
Universal History, and then tell us -- when did burdock and plantain
sprout first? It has been so written for the most part, that the times
it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages.
They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark
about them. The sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust and
confusion; and when we meet with any cheering fact which implies the
presence of this luminary, we excerpt and modernize it.
But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is
not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. It is not a
distance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky
its memorials. What is near to the heart of this generation is fair
and bright still.
If we could pierce the obscurity of those
remote years, we should find it light enough; only there is
not our day. Some creatures are made to see in the dark. There has
always been the same amount of light in the world. The new and missing
stars, the comets and eclipses, do not affect the general
illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them. The eyes of the
oldest fossil remains, they tell us, indicate that the same laws of
light prevailed then as now. Always the laws of light are the same,
but the modes and degrees of seeing vary. The gods are partial to no
era, but steadily shines their light in the heavens, while the eye of
the beholder is turned to stone. There was but the sun and the eye
from the first. The ages have not added a new ray to the one, nor
altered a fibre of the other.
If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies,
those vestiges of ancient poems, so to speak, the world's inheritance,
still reflecting some of their original splendor, like the fragments
of clouds tinted by the rays of the departed sun:
these are the
materials and hints for a history of the rise and progress of the
race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived at the condition of
men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a thousand surmises shed
some light on this story. We will not be confined by historical, even
geological periods, which would allow us to doubt of a progress in
human affairs. If we rise above this wisdom for the day, we shall
expect that this morning of the race, in which it has been supplied
with the simplest necessaries
will be succeeded by a day of
equally progressive splendor; that, in the lapse of the divine
periods, other divine agents and godlike men will assist to elevate
the race as much above its present condition. But we do not know much
about it.
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