history

He who does not know his past cannot make the best of his present and future, for it is from the past that we learn.

This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Conestoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made. (pg.333)

It can be very seductive to tell our story to others who will listen because, lets face it, who doesn't love to 'commiserate' (in this context, meaning to share their misery) with other likeminded people. It justifies our attachment to the drama. The interesting thing about telling our story over and over is that it becomes even more deeply ingrained in our minds each time we tell it, and the universe delights in keeping whatever we claim as our story alive.

It is always perilous to suppose that the past is over and done with or that it can ever safely be disconnected from the pressing concerns of the present.

It does not matter what I believe. The past is done. Hope is irrelevant. We measure success and failure in history with a cost of lives. Penicillin saved people, and the world wars exterminated them. Success and failure. Feelings, regrets, the point where they knew they made mistakes...it is interesting but unfortunately, irrelevant. Did they go to their death and grieve for what they did? Did the makers of the atomic bomb grieve for the destruction they dedicated their lives towards creating? Who cares? They did it. Whether they knew what they were creating, or whether they talked themselves into believing it was for the best, the glory of history is being able to view it in black-and-white. However honorable one's initial intention, a villain will always be a villain.

Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it's in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the party is always right.

Once you realize your past is just a story, it no longer has any power over you.

examination of its own history and of the forms of thought given the name __hilosophy_ indicates that __hilosophy_ has itself borne many fundamentally different meanings through the years, and from one school or movement to another.

History is the nothing people write about a nothing.

To deal with history [life] means to abandon one's self to chaos but to retain a belief in the ordination and the meaning. It is a very serious task.

The alchemists of past centuries tried hard to make the elixir of life: ... Those efforts were in vain; it is not in our power to obtain the experiences and the views of the future by prolonging our lives forward in this direction. However, it is well possible in a certain sense to prolong our lives backwards by acquiring the experiences of those who existed before us and by learning to know their views as well as if we were their contemporaries. The means for doing this is also an elixir of life.

I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.

I just don't see why the past has to matter.

Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs.

History cannot be erased or altered.Because that would mean killing yourself.

It is a man's duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries in life.

Through my history's despiteand ruin, I have cometo its remainder, and herehave made the beginningof a farm intended to becomemy art of being here.By it I would instructmy wants: they should belongto each other and to this place.Until my song comes hereto learn its words, my artis but the hope of song.(Part 2 from History is Clearing, p 174)

All of life and history is holding you on its shoulders so you can stretch one atom further.