Two Histories

My humanities reading tonight was better than usual. The reason was an experiment entailing extra-curricular material. The first part of my studies I spent struggling to stay engaged in the textbook's flaccid account of the French Revolution and Napoleon. So, for a change, I pulled my old Churchill off the shelf and read his chapter on the French Revolution. (Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples was one of my highschool history books.) It was like a firm, warm hand-shake after weeks of meeting people who do nothing but hang their limp hands in yours. Churchill's writing was strong and sinewed: his sentences short and direct, his modifiers sparse but descriptive. In a few words he could describe the character of a man or an age. Take, for example, these miniatures of the Revolution's leaders:

Among them was Danton, a figure of tumultuous power and dedicated energy; Robespierre, a ruthless, incorruptible tyrant; Marat, a venemous rabble-rouser of genius; and Carnot, who survived them all, the War Minister and organizer of victory.

Compare the textbook's introduction of Robespierre:

This utterly selfless revolutionary has remained controversial from his day to the present. From the beginning of the revolution, he had favored a republic. The Jacobin Club provided his primary forum and base of power. A shrewd and sensitive politician, Robespierre had opposed the war in 1792 because he feared it might aid the monarchy.

Churchill tells who he was; the textbook tells what he did. To some extent this stems from the different purposes of the authors. Churchill set out to tell a manageable account of English history as he viewed it. The textbook authors meant to present the facts of the situation with as little bias as possible. The fact is, however, that Churchill says more about the characters of those men in a single sentence than the textbook could in long paragraphs about what they did. To me that is more important than the textbook's facts. If we were historians ourselves we might want nothing but the facts, so that we could study them and construct our own interpretations. Most of us, however, read a history book asking not only to learn but to be taught. The great advantage of reading a History is that we gain access to an expert's mind, an authority's interpretation.

All of that is just my opinion, of course. I realize that this debate goes all the way back to Herodotus and Thucydides, and that my siding with one or the other camp isn't going to affect either. All I want to point out, therefore, is the literary quality of Churchill compared with the textbook. The textbook is full of information but ennervated. Churchill writes plainly, but his writing is descriptive and engaging. The textbook says more than Churchll on the page; but when the words reach the mind, Churchill's have more substance.

In medias res

Wherever you begin something, there will always be something else that comes before it. This seems especially true of a blog. You live your life, meeting people and learning things and doing things, developing a catalogue of plots and subplots along the way—and then suddenly you decide to start a blog, right smack-dab in the middle of all those storylines before any of them are finished and without giving a reader any chance to catch up. The situation looks something like this: life life life life blog! life life life. And there's no other way to do it. A blog of necessity begins in medias res—which means, as I conveniently learned in freshman humanities, in the middle of things. That's not a bad place to start a story. It lets you jump in on the action and catch up on the backstory later. It's rather like dropping you down on a path feet-first and running. As far as this blog goes, I might fill in bits that have gone before; I might not. Actually, it's quite probable that I'll post thoughts and poems sporadically and leave the narrative bits out.

I have blogged before: in a joint-project family blog, of which I am still a part and at which I still intend to post. More and more in the last few months, however, I've been thinking that I need a place to put down loose thoughts: ideas which aren't fleshed out enough to be finished projects, but are well worth saving; perhaps worth sharing, too. I also sometimes need a place to journal where I'm comfortable posting more random me-related stuff than I would on the family blog. (Not gratuitous personal details, mind you, but remarks upon little things that happen. And big things too, sometimes.) I also hope that having my own blog will stimulate me to write more. I like to think of myself as someone who writes, but for some reason I have a problem with the whole "writing" bit of being a writer. Having my own special place on the internet beckoning me to fill it with words might help. So: here I am, in the middle of things—but writing about them now. At least, that's the idea. If you want to read along, I'd be more than happy to have company along the way!