Keep The Kettle Going, PriamI've been reading The Histories before sleep these past nights, and something occurred to me. The style and content may be contributed to by a culture, time, and original language (to say nothing of the translation) all alien to me. It may also be this: when there is a scarcity of people writing stuff down, the things that get written about are those things that manage to capture the attentions of a few, and so what comes down to us is grossly filtered in part by supply and demand. Artisanal historians, if you will.
(I will cheerfully submit here that I am no Historian, trained or otherwise. It is entirely possible that not only are these thoughts entirely unoriginal, but that they are crap. Onward.)
I attended a fascinating course a few years back, offered by the History department of a local educational concern. The idea was to look at history through the words of texts written in the time of study. One nice thing about this is that voices bubble up that do not always represent the views and perspectives of those around them that went on to write the official accounts of What Happened. Part of the problem is finding these dissenting views - the folks in charge have traditionally been fairly bellicose about that sort of thing in the depths and shallows of my culture, but the small voices are there, giving us little windows into what life was like on the other side of the accepted, which was sometimes (often!) the majority population.
So. We are in the throes of our own little prosaic revolution, where broadcast is easy as picking up a keyboard, with the sometimes neglected assurance that one's words might be sticking around far longer than one may hope. We have words in our age, mountains of them (my thoughts on the veracity of such are on the About page, should you choose to believe them). The problem of Sturgeon's Revelation aside, I wonder what future historians will make of it.
The tea is ready.
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