The Historian

by Elizabeth Kostova

The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime.

history. Does the shoulder of a Turkish hillside really look so different from the slope of a Magyar meadow? Of course not, and yet the difference is as impossible to erase from the eye as the history that informs it is from the mind. Later, traveling this route, I would also see it alternately as benign and bathed in blood—this is the other trick of historical sight, to be unrelentingly torn between good and evil, peace and war.

I saw on the older woman’s face the gleam of a single tear. I’ve read there is no such thing as a single tear, that old poetic trope. And perhaps there isn’t, since hers was simply companion to my own.