Hinges Of History

At what point does our personal consciousness decide to take (or to not take) an interest in history? At what point do we lose our curiosity about the lives, civilizations and cultures that have preceded our existence?

For me, I think I've always had an interest in history that might best be described in today's terms as "running in the background." I've not actively pursued history very deeply, but I enjoy learning about it as it weaves its way into my contextual life.

Reading, similarly, has been a come-and-go lover of sorts. The first "real" book I read was Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Oddly enough, it opened my eyes and mind to the riches of literature despite his – and most other Russian authors' – propensity to use as much paper as they could in writing novels. Challenging!

But while I've had bursts of reading in which I'd pick up one immediately after closing the last chapter of another, my reading habits can be pretty spotty.

Today, however, I finally cracked open the fourth of Thomas Cahill's "Hinges Of History" series: Sailing The Wine-Red Sea: Why The Greeks Matter. I have been a fan of Cahill's since the first of this series (How The Irish Saved Civilization) was published, and have enjoyed them all.

Cahill's books, I have found, are enjoyable primarily because his approach to writing about history and its contribution to our ingress into the 21st Century is not a dry, academic approach.

His introduction to Sailing... addresses this somewhat:

I first came in contact with people of another time and place in the sayings, stories, and songs my mother taught me when I was little. These were pieces of an oral tradition, passed on to her by her mother, who died before I was born, a countrywoman from the Galway midlands. So many of the words were strange to someone growing up in twentieth-century New York City: "When you've harrowed as much as I've ploughed, then you'll know something"; "You never know who'll take the coal off your foot, when it's burning you"; "Every old shoe finds an old sock." I had been to a farm once but had never seen harrow or plough in use, I knew what coal was but had never been warmed at an open coal fire, I surely knew what shoes and socks were but nothing of the archaic courting practices in the Irish countryside. My mother explained patiently that this last was meant as a hilarious sendup of old maids and their prospects. The sexual aspect of the imagery she doubtlessly left me to work out for myself. But her waves of words had a sort of triple (and simultaneous) effect: first, the experience of coming into contact with alien lives through the medium of the words they had left behind; then, an acknowledgment of the humanity I shared with these strangers from another time and place; and, last, the satisfying thrill that concentrated, metaphorical language can give its listener – the electric sensation at the back of the neck announcing the arrival of the gods of poetry.

It is through such wisps of words and such tantalizingly incomplete images that we touch the past and its peoples. When I attended a Jesuit high school in New York City and was taught to read Latin and ancient Greek, I had my first scholarly taste of the strangeness of other ages. In Homer's gods and heroes and in Ovid's Metamorphoses,I discovered the fleeting reflections of what was once a complete world: Odysseus putting out the giant's single eye, enormous in his forehead and balefully glistening; Niobe's many children, struck dead one at a time by the arrows of Apollo and Artenu's, as Niobe stood by helpless, in mounting hysteria, finally consumed by insensate despair. Nothing like their plights had ever happened, or would ever happen, to me. I would never encounter a cyclops or be hunted by Apollo, but I could nonetheless feel as their victims felt: I could take on Odysseus' twitching anxiety in the face of an unbeatable enemy and the hopelessness of terminal captivity in the service of a monster (even if I had as yet but scant experience of being someone's employee); I could resonate with Niobe's heartsickness, fevered attempts to protect her children, and catatonic despair. I too had known impossible opponents; I too understood how much a mother loved her children.

Just around the corner from my school was the Metropolitan Museum of Art – which I discovered without the help of the Jesuits, who were verbal but not visual. There, in the old gallery of classical art, I first saw the faint traces of paint on the classical marble statuary and learned that the eyeless bronzes had once been fitted with lifelike irises. There I saw an accurate model of the Parthenon with its excited and boldly colored frieze of gods and heroes. I came to understand that ancient Greece had not been a collection of tasteful white marble statues but a place on fire with color. I made the connection between these astonishing figures that now lived along Fifth Avenue and the brilliant colors of Homer's metaphors: "the wine-dark sea," "the rosy-fingered dawn." I had, without knowing it, put the literature in a context.

I tell you these things now because my methods to approaching the past have scarcely changed since childhood and adolescence. I assemble what pieces there are, contrast and compare, and try to remain in their presence till I can begin to see and hear and love what living men and women once saw and heard and loved, till from these scraps and fragments living men and women begin to emerge and move and live again and then I try to communicate these sensations to my reader. So you will find in this book no breakthrough discoveries, no cutting-edge scholarship, Just, if I have succeeded, the feelings and perceptions of another age and, insofar as possible, real and rounded men and women. For me, the historian's principal task should be to raise the dead to life.

It is so unfortunate that so many of us have simply given in to that voice that says it's "too hard" to read; "too hard" to study history. We seem to pay attention to the Alexanders of the world, and the Titanics, but we also seem to simply leave our curiosity about our history to others for them to dramatize – instead of using our own minds to create our own movies.