History

Peter The Great. 


1672 - 1725


Look what I just did.

I wrote his name.  I wrote his birth.  I wrote his death.  Almost in one sentence.

He lived, he died, he is remembered.  Was remembered.  Sometimes is remembered.

As I'm reading history, I'm wondering about these long lost souls that I've just discovered. I learn a name--sometimes there's a face--I learn what that name did, and then I move on.  There's no life.  There's no function.  What did he believe in?  What were his dreams?  What were his fears?  What was his desires?  And now as I close the book, I may also close the memory.  They're all just memories.  Some of them did so much in life.  They built empires, they had many wives, they traveled all around the world, they broke steel in battle.  They did so much.  And then...they left.  Now they're gone.  They're ink on a textbook.  They're a sound across a podium and a classroom.


The substance is missing.

And then, there are those who do not make even that.  The average populace is unknown.  The slaves are forgotten.  The peasants are an abstraction.  We know not a single thing for those who did not do "great" things.  Did the poor not do "great" things?  Did they not support the empire under hushed voices?  They're all just hushed voices.  Dissipated in the wind.  I wonder what it was like.

I wish I could know what it was like.

Or do I?   Am I a lucky one?  I live in the U.S., don't I?  I have a car, a family, money in my pocket, hot food on the table, and amazing opportunities in the present and in the future.  Do I really want to know what it was like?

Was it boring?  Was it drab?  Was it hopeless?  Was it meaningless?  Was any of it meaningful?

Or am I, too, ink on a page.  Or a hushed voice to be forgotten?

Maybe it doesn't matter.  Maybe what just matters...

is Me.  It's all ...well, relative...to me.

It makes me wonder what life was like before I was born.  But...in a purely psychological sense...and as far as I am concerned, the world never existed before me.  What is the world...if not my experience?  What is the world if not my vision, my hearing, my senses?

Then perhaps, you cannot explain history in that manner.   History, too, is a variation of ups and downs.  A variation of senses.  Whether bloody or hopeful.

I don't know what it was like to live back then.  But I do know what it's like to live now.  I'm here aren't I?

...then why should it matter?

Let me think about it...