In her talk on the reality of the past, Elizabeth swapped a picture of a solitary and stationary observer for a community of humans, each of whom is a witness to a tiny part of human life. She transformed the lonely individual into someone who is alive at a particular historical moment, with one perspective among many, living in a human society that weaves together the common past by answering various forms of this question: ‘What happened?’ ‘What did you do?’ ‘What did you see?’ Each contributes a thread to that tapestry, one thread in a pattern that transcends each individual and that is
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