History is the long shadow cast by the past upon the future. Shadows, by nature, lack details.
As a species, we seem incapable of understanding the universe except by telling stories. History is our collective effort at telling stories about the past.
Like all stories, history imposes a shape and pattern on what is essentially random. So, some things are left out; some things are emphasized; causes are attributed to effects; plots are invented to explain away the fortuitous and coincidental.
Even without deliberate efforts to mislead, stories about the same set of events in the past will differ depending on the teller and the audience. All histories are simplifications, sketches, shadows cast on the cave wall by the moth of reality flittering around a flickering flame, the details lost.
Yet we cannot stop justifying our actions in the light cone of past precedents, to find emanations and penumbras that revise or reinforce the injustices we find in the present, to interpret and read history as a prologue to the future.
This is both to be lamented and to be celebrated.
If there’s one thing I want you to take away from this, it’s the complexity of history, no less so than the present reality you know so well. We do the past an injustice when we think we can reduce it down to one story (or even a thousand stories). Even a thousand shadows cannot add up to one living reality; our ancestors were no less multidimensional than we, and we can’t fully honor our own humanity until we recognize theirs.
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