Happy Memorial Day: Remember

Peggy Noonan cites David McCullough's new book on why it is so important that we study and understand the past in her Wall Street Journal column this weekend, concluding with several bullet points:

Here, gleaned from the book, are some of Mr. McCullough’s observations on history.

• It is a story. “Tell stories,” said the historian Barbara Tuchman. And what is a story? Mr. McCullough, paraphrasing E.M. Forster, observes: “If I say to you the king died and then the queen died, that’s a sequence of events. If I say the king died and the queen died of grief, that’s a story.”

• What’s past to us was the present to them. “Adams, Jefferson, George Washington, they didn’t walk about saying, ‘Isn’t this fascinating, living in the past?’ It was the present, their present.” They were acting in real time and didn’t know how things would turn out. . . .

• Nothing had to happen the way it happened. “History could have gone off in any number of different directions in any number of different ways at almost any point, just as your own life can.” “One thing leads to another. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Actions have consequences.” These things sound obvious, he says, but are not to those who are just starting out and trying to understand life. . . .

• History is an antidote to the hubris of the present. We think everything we have, do and think is the ultimate, the best. “We should never look down on those of the past and say they should have known better. What do you think they will be saving about us in the future? They’re going to be saying we should have known better.”

She posted her column on Facebook, so perhaps it's still available without paying for access!

I particularly liked the comments "What's past to us was the present to them" and "Nothing had to happen the way it happened." It seems to me that those two comments vitiate the entire "Whig interpretation" of history that sees the events of the past as necessary for the progress of the future. 

Happy Memorial Day!

Tolkien and Lewis at Eighth Day Books

My husband and I enjoyed celebrating one of Eighth Day Books' two anniversaries Saturday night (the May anniversary is of its moving to its present location at 2838 East Douglas; the September anniversary is of its opening; last year was its 25th anniversary!). I baked a carrot cake and Warren's wife Chris had prepared a nice selection of snacks--a group of our friends met and we sat and talked about books, and education, and faith, and family for about three hours.


But now, to my purchases that evening: The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary from OUP and Medieval Literary: A Compendium of Medieval Knowledge with the Guidance of C.S. Lewis from Fons Vitae! When Warren showed me the latter I immediately thought of C.S. Lewis' The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, which I own in the old Cambridge University Press paperback, and which is filled with notes taken on mimeographed pages, recycled from the WSU History Department! I also bought two beautiful cards from the Laughing Elephant press, with illustrations by Marie Angel and quotations by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Jakob Bohme, like this one:

Only at Eighth Day Books, I think, could one find such a combination of erudition and beauty, friendship and delight, wine and cheese, snacks and cake, memories and future hopes--we are planning a reunion of our Ignatius J. Reilly reading group there in a few months--so many of the joys of life. Speaking of memories, one of my most cherished memories of Eighth Day Books was the night we all gathered for my book reading and signing! Here's a picture of my late father and my sister. Thinking of him this Memorial Day, I recall how proud he was of me that night, how much he enjoyed the festivity, and of course, how much I and all my family miss him!