The Historian

by Elizabeth Kostova

“Looking back at that moment, I understand that I had lived in books so long, in my narrow university setting, that I had become compressed by them internally. Suddenly, in this echoing house of Byzantium—one of the wonders of history—my spirit leaped out of its confines. I knew in that instant that, whatever happened, I could never go back to my old constraints. I wanted to follow life upward, to expand with it outward, the way this enormous interior swelled upward and outward.

‘How is it that you know so much about history? I thought you were an anthropologist.’ “‘I am,’ she said gravely. ‘But you cannot study cultures without a knowledge of their history.’

“History has taught us that the nature of man is evil, sublimely so. Good is not perfectible, but evil is.