I still read a lot of history, and of course, I’ve followed all the official history that’s happened in my own lifetime - the fall of Communism, Mrs. Thatcher, 9/11, global warming - with a normal mixture of fear, anxiety and cautious optimism. But I’ve never felt the same about it. I’ve never quite trusted it as I do events in Greece or Rome or the British Empire or the Russian Revolution. Perhaps I just feel safer with the history that’s been more or less agreed upon. Or perhaps it’s that same paradox again. The history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest. And yet, it’s the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history - even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?
Julian Barnes, The Sense of An Ending (via 20727)

Source: chekhonte

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