If you find all this gloomy, you don't know what gloom is. If you find this irrelevant, I hope time will prove you right. Should you find this inappropriate for such a lofty occasion, I will disagree.
I would agree with you had this occasion been celebrating your staying here; but it marks your departure. By tomorrow you'll be out of here, since your parents paid only for four years, not a day longer. So you must go elsewhere, to make your careers, money, families, to meet your unique fates. And as for that elsewhere, neither among stars and in the tropics nor across the border in Vermont is there much awareness of this ceremony on the Dartmouth Green. One wouldn't even bet that the sound ofyour band reaches White River Junction.
You are exiting this place, members of the class of 1989. You are entering the world, which is going to be far more thickly settled than this neck of the woods and where you'll be paid far less attention than you have been used to for the last four years. You are on your own in a big way. Speaking of your significance, you can quickly estimate it by pitting your 1,100 against the world's 4.9 billion. Prudence, then, is as appropriate on this occasion as is fanfare.
I wish you nothing but happiness. Still, there is going to be plenty of dark and, what's worse, dull hours, caused as much by the world outside as by your own minds. You ought to be fortified against that in some fashion; and that's what I've tried to do here in my feeble way, although that's obviously not enough.
For what lies ahead is a remarkable but wearisomejour- ney; you are boarding today, as it were, a runaway train. No one can tell you what lies ahead, least ofall those who remain behind. One thing, however, they can assure you of is that it's not a round trip. Try, therefore, to derive some comfort from the notion that no matter how unpalatable this or that station may tum out to be, the train doesn't stop there for good. Therefore, you are never stuck—not even when you feel you are; for this place today becomes your past. From now on, it willonly be receding for you, for that train is in constant motion. It will be receding for you even when you feel that you are stuck ... So take one last look at it, while it is still its normal size, while it is not yet a photograph. Look at it with all the tenderness you can muster, for you are looking at your past. Exact, as it were, the full look at the best. For I doubt you'll ever have it better than here.
Profile of Clio
I never thought it would come to this, to my speaking on history. But as concessions to one's age go, a lecture on the subject appears inevitable. An invitation to deliver it suggests not so much the value of the speaker's views as his perceptible moribundity. "He is history" goes the disparaging remark, referring to a has-been, and it is the proximity of an individual to this status that turns him, sometimes in his own eyes, into a sage. After all, those to whom we owe the very notion of history—the great historians as well as their subjects—are the dead. In other words, the closer one gets to one's future, i.e., to the graveyard, the better one sees the past.
I accept this. The recognition of mortality gives birth to all sorts of insights and qualifiers. History, after all, is one of those nouns that can't do without epithets. Left to its own devices, history stretches from our own childhood all the way back to the fossils. It may stand simultaneously for the past in general, the recorded past, an academic discipline, the quality of the present, or the implication of a continuum. Every culture has its own version of antiquity; so does every century; so should, I believe, every individual. Consensus
Delivered as the Huizinga Lecture at the University of Leiden in 1991.
on this noun's definition is, therefore, unthinkable and, come to think of it, unnecessary. It is always used loosely as an antonym to the present and is defined by the context of discourse. Given my age as well as my metier, I should be interested in those antonyms, in each one of them. At my age and in my line of work, the less palpable a notion, the more absorbing it is.
If we have anything in common with antiquity, it is the prospect of nonbeing. This alone can engender the study of history, as perhaps it did, because what history is all about is absence, and absence is always recognizable—much more so than presence. Which is to say that our interest in history, normally billed as the quest for a common denominator, for the origins of our ethics, is, in the first place, an eschato- logical, and therefore anthropomorphic, and therefore narcissistic, affair. This is proved by all sorts of revisionist quarrels and bickerings that abound in this field, thus recalling a model arguing with an artist over her depiction— or a bunch of artists in front of an empty canvas.
Further proof of this is our predilection for reading— and the historians' for producing—the lives of Caesars, pharaohs, satraps, kings, and queens. These have nothing to do with the common denominator, and often not much with ethics either. We go in for this sort of reading because of the central position that we believe we occupy in our own reality, because of the illusion of the individual's paramount consequence. To that one must add that, like biographies, those lives are, stylistically speaking, the last bastions of realism, since in this genre stream-of-consciousness and other avant-garde hopscotch techniques won't do.
The net result is the expression of uncertainty that bedevils every portrait of history. That's what the model fights over with the artist, or the artists among themselves. For the model—let us call her Clio—may think herself, or her agents, more resolute and clear-cut than the way historians paint her. Yet one can understand historians projecting their own ambiguities and subtleties upon their subject: in the light—or rather, the dark—of what awaits them, they don't wish to seem like simpletons. Generally known for their longevity, historians, by showing scruple and doubt, turn their discipline into a kind of insurance policy.
Whether he realizes it or not, the historian's predicament is to be transfixed between two voids: of the past that he ponders and of the future for whose sake he ostensibly does this. For him, the notion of nonbeing gets doubled. Perhaps the voids even overlap. Unable to handle both, he strives to animate the former, since by definition the past, as a source of personal terror, is more controllable than the future.
His opposite number, then, should be the religious mystic or the theologian. Admittedly, the structuring of the afterlife involves a greater degree of rigidity than that of the pre-life. What makes up for this difference, however, is their respective quests for causality, the common denominator, and the ethical consequences for the present—so much so that in a society in which the authority of the church is in decline, and the authority of philosophy and the state are negligible or nonexistent, it falls precisely to history to take care of ethical matters.
In the end, of course, the choice that one's eschato- logical proclivity makes between history and religion is determined by temperament. Yet regardless of the commandments of one's bile, or whether one is retrospective, introspective, or prospective by nature, the inalienable aspect of either pursuit is the anxiety of its validity. In this respect, the fondness of all creeds for citing their pedigree and their general reliance on historical sources is particularly worth noting. For when it comes to the burden of proof, history, unlike religion, has nobody to turn to but itself.