My Dad Was Into History

Ramblings inspired by Neil Oliver’s ‘A History of Ancient Britain’ - found on my Dad’s old bookshelf.

“We stand not on the shoulders of giants, but of the rank and file. The individuals who, condemned to a life within the limits of their circumstance, found courage and meaning enough to live it fully.”

My Dad was into History. I don’t think I ever really ‘got’ it, at least not in the way he did - and certainly not in time to share it with him. There is a tendency to separate ourselves from our ancestors, to draw lines in the sand and assume superiority as ‘modern’ humans. We alienate ourselves from our past, pointing at science, technology and our modern sensibilities as proof of progress; proof of a distinction in the human condition. How lonely it must then be to reject this tendency. To find yourself in a world saturated with technological advancements, at the front line of the relentless march of human progress, and yet feel to share so much humanity with the people, communities and lives of the past. Would this alienation not consume you?

Since the advent of farming, we have broken free from the glacial pace of evolution driven by natural selection and enacted change on our environment faster than any biological mutation could ever manifest within a population inhabiting said environment. Nonetheless, it’s worth remembering that we are the same Homo sapiens sapiens today as we were 10,000 years ago, when Britain was released from the clutches of the last glacial maximum and nomadic farmers and opportunistic hunters wielding flint made these Islands their home. Whilst, on the surface, our environment and our place within it has changed enough so as to be beyond recognition, we’re still the same bipedal mammal with all its eggs placed in the baskets of intelligence and communication. Indeed, a neolithic baby raised in our modern time would be indiscernible from you and I.

Accepting this commonality so often rejected, the study of History becomes a philosophical pursuit. To borrow from perhaps the most famous allegory, the archaeologist escapes for a time his own cave of shadows, stepping instead into one which his ancestors were chained, glimpsing the forms cast on the wall before their eyes. Crossing the boundaries of a human lifetime the relics unearthed and monuments still standing confront the beholder with with the liminal. Behold the forms that offered the closest thing to permanence on someone's cave walls, grounding his or her humanity.

For Dad, History was never about the Kings or Conquerors, not really. It was about the normal folk, the common rabble and the clan. The imprints left on a world by individuals with lives no more important and no less meaningful than your own.

We stand not on the shoulders of giants, but of the rank and file. The individuals who, condemned to a life within the limits of their circumstance, found courage and meaning enough to live it fully. Yes, it is the giants whose names are known to us, whose existence has stood the test of time better than the rest. The kings, the emperors, the conquerors and the saints. The buildings and streets afterall, are named after slavedrivers not the slaves. Yet it is whilst the kings are pre-occupied penning their names into the story of mankind, scratching with their fingernails on the rock they claim for a time as their own, so desperately needing to be remembered, that the real humanity unfolds in the background.

I contend therefore, that it is in this background noise of history where we may remember forgotten truths. In the search for common understanding and meaning, look to the subjects and the subjected, not the subjectors. For all the tales of heroes and warriors, the human story boils down to one of perseverance.

Man is left to persevere and carve a life worth living out of whatever liberty is left to him within the boundaries to which he conforms. Thus, the only forms worth glimpsing in the allegorical, archaeological cave are those of the actions taken and the marks left by individuals exercising the liberty of self expression afforded to them in their time.

It is here then where I meet my father’s memory, and where I say wisdom may yet be found; peering through the façade and searching for the lives lived - not the stories told. Grappling with the same finity of existence that inspires heirlooms to be passed on, monoliths to be raised and art to be created. Here then, is where all distinctions, all assumptions of superiority, and all alienation crumbles. Lives, distinct in time but not space, trying to persevere well.