The Robber Bride (1998)
“We choose a significant event and examine its causes and its consequences, but who decides whether the event is significant? We do, and we are here; and it and its participants are there. They are long gone; at the same time, they are in our hands. Like Roman gladiators, they are under our thumbs. We make them fight their battles over again for our edification and pleasure, who fought them once for entirely other reasons.
Yet history is not a true palindrome, thinks Tony. We can’t really run it... backwards and end up at a clean start. Too many of the pieces have gone missing; also we know too much, we know the outcome. Historians are the quintessential voyeurs, noses pressed to Time’s glass window. They can never actually be there on the battlefield, they can never join in those moments of supreme exaltation, or of supreme grief either. Their re-creations are at the best just patchy waxworks. Who’d choose to be God? To know the whole story, its violent clashes, its mêlées, its deadly conclusions, before it even begins?MoreLess
Yet history is not a true palindrome, thinks Tony. We can’t really run it... backwards and end up at a clean start. Too many of the pieces have gone missing; also we know too much, we know the outcome. Historians are the quintessential voyeurs, noses pressed to Time’s glass window. They can never actually be there on the battlefield, they can never join in those moments of supreme exaltation, or of supreme grief either. Their re-creations are at the best just patchy waxworks. Who’d choose to be God? To know the whole story, its violent clashes, its mêlées, its deadly conclusions, before it even begins?MoreLess
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