(Also, unlike creeds, history to its credit stops cold at geology, thus demonstrating a degree of honesty and its potential for turning into a science.)
This makes history, I believe, a more dramatic choice. An escape route trying to prove every step of the way that it is an escape route? Perhaps, but we judge the effectiveness of our choices not so much by their results as by their alternatives. The certitude of your existence's discontinuity, the certitude of the void, makes the uncertainties of history a palpable proposition. In fact, the more uncertain it is, the greater its burden of proof, the better it quells your escha- tological dread. Frankly, it is easier for an effect to handle the shock of its inconsequence, easier to face the unavoidable void, than the apparent lack of its cause (for instance, when one's progenitors are gone).
Hence that vagueness in the looks of Clio, whether she is decked out in ancient or in fairly modem garb. Yet it becomes her, not least because of her femininity, which makes her more attractive to the eye than any bearded Pan- tocrator. It should also be noted that, younger though she is than her sister Urania (who, being the Muse of Geography, curbs many of history's motions significantly), Clio is still older than any being. As large as one's appetite for infinity may be, this is a good match for the life everlasting, should it go in for numerical expression. What's particularly unpalatable about death is that it negates numbers.
So it is as Clio's admirer that I stand before you today, not as a connoisseur of her works, let alone as her suitor. Like anyone of my age, I may also claim the status of her witness; but by neither temperament nor metier am I prepared to generalize about her deportment. The metier especially conspires against my expanding on any—particularly any absorbing—subject. It trains one, albeit not always sue- cessfully, to make one's utterances succinct, sometimes to the point of appearing hermetic and losing either one's audience or, more often, the subject itself. So should you find some of what is to follow too breezy or inconclusive, you'll know whom to blame. It's Euterpe.
Now, Clio of course also has a knack for brevity, which she displays in a murder or in an epitaph. Those two genres alone give the lie to Marx's famous adage about history occurring first as tragedy, then as farce. For it is always a different man who gets murdered; it is always a tragedy. Not to mention that once we're employing theatrical terminology, we shouldn't stop at farce: there is also vaudeville, musical, theater of the absurd, soap opera, and so on. One should be very careful about metaphors when dealing with history, not only because they often breed either unwarranted cynicism (like the example I just quoted) or groundless enthusiasm, but also because they obscure—almost without exception—the singular nature of every historical occurrence.
For Clio is the Muse of Time, as the poet said, and in time nothing happens twice. Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of that theatrical metaphor is that it ushers into one's mind the sense of being a spectator, of observing from the stalls what transpires on the stage, be it a farce or a tragedy. Even if such a state of affairs were really possible, that in itself would be a tragedy: that of complicity; that is, a tragedy of the ethical kind. The truth, however, is that history does not provide us with distance. It does not distinguish between the stage and the audience, which it often lacks, since murder, for one thing, is almost synonymous with the absence of witnesses. Let me quote the poet's—W. H. Auden's — invocation of Clio a bit more fully:
Clio,
Muse of Time, but for whose merciful silence Only the first step would count and that Would always be murder ...
Since everything that happens in time happens only once, we, in order to grasp what has occurred, have to identify with the victim, not with the survivor or the onlooker. As it is, however, history is an art of the onlookers, since the victims' main trait is their silence, for murder renders them speechless. If our poet is referring to the story of Cain and Abel, then history is always Cain's version. The reason for putting this so drastically is to assert the distinction between fact and its interpretation, which we fail to make when we say "history."
This failure leads to our belief that we can learn from history, and that it has a purpose, notably ourselves. For all our fondness for causality and hindsight, this assumption is monstrous, since it justifies many an absence as paving the way to our own presences. Had they not been bumped off, this benefit of hindsight tells us, it would be somebody else sitting here at our table, not exactly ourselves. Our interest in history, in that case, would be plain prurience, tinged perhaps with gratitude.
And perhaps that's exactly what it is, which would put us on a somewhat bland ethical diet; but then we were never gluttonous that way to begin with (for we accept the erasure of our predecessors to the point at which we should perhaps take history out of the humanities altogether and place it squarely with the natural sciences). The other option is to distinguish between fact and description, treating each historical event as Clio's unique appearance in human quarters, triggered not by our formal logic but by her own arbitrary will. The drawback in this case is that, placing as high a premium on rationality and linear thought as we do, we may panic, and either collapse as ethical beings or, more likely, dash for a further Cartesian rigidity.
None ofthis is desirable or satisfactory. To accept history as a rational process governed by graspable laws is impossible, because it is often too carnivorous. To regard it as an irrational force of incomprehensible purpose and appetite is equally unacceptable, and for the same reason: it acts on our species. A target cannot accept a bullet.
Characteristically, the voice of our instinct for self-preservation comes out as a cry: What are we to tell our young? Because we are the products of linear thought, we believe that history, whether it is a rational process or an irrational force, is to dog the future. Linear thinking, to be sure, is a tool of the instinct for self-preservation; and in the conflict between this instinct and our eschatological predilection, it is the former that always wins. It is a Pyrrhic victory, but what matters is the battle itself, and our notion of the future amounts to an extension of our own present. For we know that every bullet flies in from the future, which, in order to arrive, has to wipe out the obstacle of the present. That's what our notion of history is for, that's why interpretation is preferred to fact, that's why the irrational version is always dismissed.
It is hard to argue with an instinct; in fact, it is futile. We simply crave the future, and history is here to make that claim, or the future itself, legitimate. If indeed we care so much about what we are to tell the young, the following should be done. First, we should define history as a summary either of known events or of their interpretations. In all likelihood, we'll settle for the latter, since every event's name is itself an interpretation. Since interpretations are unavoidable, the second step should be the publication of a chronological canon of world history, in which every event would be supplied with a minimum number of interpretations— say, conservative, Marxist, Freudian, structuralist. This may result in an unwieldy encyclopedia, but the young about whom we seem to worry so much will at least be provided with a multiple choice.
Apart from enabling them to think more enterprisingly, such a canon will render Clio more stereoscopic, and thus more easily recognizable in a crowd or a drawing room. For portraits in profile, three-quarters, or even full face (down to the last pore, in the manner of the Annales school) invariably obscure what one may hold behind one's back. This sort of thing lowers one's guard, and this is how history usually finds us: with our guard down.