History is the study of the past — but what is the past? It is everything that has happened up to the present. Precedence tends to be given to the distant past, which is separated from us less by time than by the absence of immediate sensual knowledge, so that the smallest fragment of a bowl from a seventeenth-century merchant’s family seems to contain within itself the revelation of a vanished world. But that same fragment, historically speaking, is of no more importance than yesterday’s teacup. The pastness of the past infects all artifacts equally. Cathedrals, stone ax-heads, cereal boxes, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon — all are leveled in the long democracy of the done. For just as, in a single moment of the distant past, an Egyptian comb is of no less historical interest than a pyramid, so in the vast stretch of all pastness a pyramid is of no more historical interest than a Coca-Cola bottle. Our task, as members of the Historical Society, is not to hierarchize the past, but to collect and preserve it.
This view of the past, which began to gain ground among us during the last years of the old millennium, has led to a new conception of the present. It’s our view, here at the Historical Society, that the present is the past made visible. Close your eyes and open them: in that instant of darkness, the entire world has fallen into the past. It is replaced by another world that itself is only a newer and more visible past. The science of optics informs us that the act of vision is a direct seeing of the past, since we see only after streams of photons, striking the photoreceptors in the retina, are transmuted into electrical impulses that travel along the optic nerve and make their way to the visual cortex. The present is our most recent past. It is also our most complete past. Indeed, we no longer use the word “present,” here at the Historical Society, but speak instead of the New Past.
Even the future, viewed historically, is only a past that hasn’t yet revealed itself, a past that is taking shape secretly, in dark rooms, behind closed doors that any day now will suddenly fly open from the sheer pressure of accumulation.
Our goal is clear. For the first time, we here at the Historical Society have the chance to capture the past completely, in all its overwhelming variety and luminous, precise detail. Our well-trained staff of researchers and assistant researchers go out each day to observe and classify a world that is already a part of the historical record. Our account includes measurements, descriptions, digital photographs, and, wherever possible, samples of every stop sign, fire hydrant, and telephone pole in our town, every roof slope and chimney, every Monopoly piece and badminton racket, every cobweb in every corner of every attic. We include every soup spoon and sugar maple, every design on the back of every deck of playing cards. As we pursue our work, our desire for completeness increases, and our categories grow more exacting. There are assistants who count the needles of every fir tree and the specks of mica in every roof shingle, others who study the patterns of grass blades flying up behind a power mower and settling onto the cut grass. We record the sounds of dishes and silverware in the kitchens of our town, the exact fall of the shadows of fence posts and street signs. We investigate the bend in a blue rubber band wrapped around a morning newspaper lying on a sun-striped front porch.
In an undertaking of this scope, criticism cannot be eluded or ignored. There are those who say in the accents of self-righteousness that we should stick to the “real” past — to our Indian ax-heads, our Puritan utensils, our Revolutionary War cannonballs. Why else would anyone wish to visit the Historical Society? To such critics we reply that the past you look for is a delusion, a dream composed of a fistful of images snatched at random from the fate that awaits all things. But look around you, in the streets of our town. What do you see? You see, alive in all its vividness, the one past you can fully grasp. History is a scrupulous record of missing evidence — of lost cities, smashed statues, ruined libraries. Now is the only past we’ll ever know.
And our past is expanding. The official history, published in 1998, on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of our town’s founding, comprises two volumes of 464 and 432 pages, respectively. In the year 2000 we started the Supplementary Series, which grew to 24 volumes in the next few years, and in 2005 we launched the Supplementary Series II, an online project that, if printed, would fill more than 500 volumes. Here one can find the most detailed record of a historical period ever attempted. Nothing is considered too negligible for the attention of our researchers — indeed, the Negligible itself has proved an unusually rich field for investigation. Here, every drawer pull and jar lid and pot-cover knob is accounted for, every hair wave and shirt weave. Here, we record the shapes of lines on the soles of sneakers, we follow the flight of dandelion puffs as they separate from the stalk and drift through the air. This is the exact and multifarious evidence of the New Past, which future generations will study closely while glancing with impatience at their boxful of broken pieces from the Old Past.
Meanwhile, the artifacts pour in. What finds, what treasures of the quotidian! — refrigerator magnets, roof shingles, cracker boxes, Clue boards, mouse pads, hockey sticks, muffin pans, space heaters, fence pickets, night-lights, zip disks, lawn sprinklers, porcelain kittens, maple leaves, wooden ice-cream spoons. Already we’ve constructed an outbuilding in back, with rows of narrow drawers from floor to ceiling and a deep cellar, and plans are under way for a series of underground display rooms and computerized research facilities.
One newspaper columnist has suggested, with heavy wit, that what we desire is to draw within our walls, piece by piece, our entire town, with its stores and street corners, its attics and backyards, its power lines and paper clips. What he fails to understand is that our town is disappearing daily, hurtling into a past as remote as Sumer. We wish only to make it more visible, before it vanishes entirely.
Recently we’ve come under attack from those who say that our love of the past represents a flight from life, a retreat into a world of artifacts. Such critics, who tend to be young, save their harshest attacks for our view of the New Past, which, they claim, turns the living, teeming world into a museum. In our defense we argue that most people walk through the world registering a handful of general impressions — tree, dog, nice house — whereas our meticulous and passionate researches multiply the details of the world and increase its being. One group of youths, who call themselves Brothers of the Rising Sun, have interfered with our researchers in the field and have twice broken into our building, smashing contemporary exhibit cases and damaging, perhaps by mistake, a clay pipe belonging to a Setaucus chieftain. What they cannot understand is that they too, with their orange T-shirts, their black jackets adorned with yellow insignia, their nose tattoos and neck rings, their violent gestures and quaint ideas, are part of the historical record.
And so we carry on, here at the Historical Society. Although we scrupulously arrange exhibits of Setaucus canoes and nineteenth-century ropewalks, although we continue to purchase for our library early town documents, histories of the Indian wars, and records of farm and factory production, our hearts are most deeply stirred by the New Past: by the drips of red paint on a can in an open, sun-flooded garage, by the arc of a rubber ball thrown against the side of a white-shingled house on which you can see the ball’s bluish shadow, by the dim rainbow trembling in the hose spray aimed at the wet-gleaming side of a car. We can only make guesses about that other past, which stretches back through a few blurry centuries to the black beginnings of the world. But the New Past gives us hope. It stands before us in a nearly unfaded richness. It tempts us with the promise of total precision. Yet even as we record it, even as we reach out to touch it, we see it dissolving before our eyes, revealing a piece of the next past that has already replaced it. For we walk through a world no longer there, toward tomorrows that are only yesterdays. Look! That corner mailbox is an ancient ziggurat. Turn the next corner and you come to Alexandria. For once you accept the New Past, nothing is unworthy of your closest and most reverent attention. Those who accuse us of straying from our duty might ask themselves whether they see one-hundredth of what we see, on any afternoon, on any sidewalk. For us, the sun glinting on a piece of cellophane lying in a patch of roadside weeds speaks more eloquently than the history of Rome. For that’s the way we look at things, here at the Historical Society.