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A historical bon mot…

Adapting a meme from my good friend Froog:

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”

L.P. Hartley

From the archives

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February 18th, 2009

6 comments to A historical bon mot…

  • Peony
    February 18, 2009 at 2:17 pm

    Have you ever seen this before?

    http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200504/the.fable.of.the.rat.htm

    I’ve always like the way Lunde writes and thought you might like it as well.

  • Jeremiah
    February 18, 2009 at 9:46 pm

    Peony,

    That is a great story, and apropos to our long-running discussion. Thanks for sharing the link and I encourage others to check it out as well.

    Ps. As you may have guessed, I had our discussion in mind when I posted this today.

  • Peony
    February 19, 2009 at 4:41 am

    Hi J

    I’m glad you liked it. I did too. I just tried to leave a comment to wu ming on the other thread… it doesn’t seem to be showing up :(
    Maybe in your spam folder…

    Have a good one!

  • Peony to Wu Ming
    February 21, 2009 at 5:32 am

    with memory one cannot live; without forgetting, one goes mad from distraction.

    I am not sure….

    Oe Kenzaburo has written much about this in a very poignant way, I think. That this idea of collective memory– history– is the only recourse that people 民 have to not be manipulated by the powerful 権. (As Oe posits that this is precisely how governments manipulate people into taking actions which are not in the people’s own best interest– that is they do this by manipulating collective historical consciousness–)

    I think it is true that not forgetting is perhaps the only recourse for not repeating the mistakes of the past. This idea of historical consciousness has loomed large in Oe’s writings about Hiroshima or Okinawa, for example.

    historical consciousness versus memory rifts….

    By the way, I really liked Kapuscinki’s book on Herodotus– though I know there have been criticisms.. :)

  • wu ming
    February 21, 2009 at 8:53 pm

    i’m afraid i was being both a bit flip and overly literal.

    remembering is in one sense also the act of forgetting everything not deemed important; both acts are inextricably linked, since memory requires a sorting out of specific things to remember. too much information and we end up crushed under the weight of totality (unless, of course, we are annales historians…).

    in a historical sense, memory, being rooted in the needs of the present for explanation or meaning, also necessitates a similar kind of forgetting; that of other memories that don’t fit into or contradict the needs of the present rememberer.

  • Peony to Wu Ming
    February 22, 2009 at 5:06 am

    Hi Wu Ming,

    Flip and literal– add a bottle of booze and we’d be a party.

    These is a nice video..
    Have a good one,

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQspTWQZEgM&eurl