Tag: history

Historiography repeatedly delivers such a shock that it is impossible for the student not to enter a state of revolt. This happens, for example, when we study the systematic advance of the state over freedoms, penetrating and perverting the social tissue more and more completely, so that today, transformed into a very powerful monster, it has practically annulled the possibility of reaction. Revolt is legitimate: people have risen up and heads have rolled for far less. Thinking about the “abusive” taxes of the past and comparing them with the peaceful, bovine acceptance of radically higher taxes today is a stab in the spirit. However, we have to overcome our revolt and continue studying, because first of all we need to understand exactly what happened.

It must be a rather unpleasant task for the historian who, having set out to narrate the biography of the great man, cannot hide from it the ever-present and ever-hateful action of the mediocre men who envy him and try to bring him down. And, after all, there seems to have been no historian who could get rid of this burden, since, in order to avoid the envious, a talented man would have to never show himself. If he does manage to stand out, the relentless Japanese proverb ensues. There really is no greater effort than that required to know the world and not curse it; reflected optimism is a tremendous and meritorious intellectual feat.

Comparing the news with history books is extremely educational, as it shows that this sense of urgency, that something decisive is always happening, is absolutely unfounded. How little is left of these trifles! And we do not even need to look at history: we open newspapers in other countries and see the same inclination, perhaps driven by marketing, to present everything as important, while we, here at the end of the world, do not even know the bulk of the actors painted as extremely important. Almost everything is exaggerated, when what really matters cannot be found in any newspaper.

Some biographies generate in us moderns an effect similar to the one we experience when, after getting bored with some trifle or complaining about life, we meet a homeless person. Because, in fact, some of the most famous names in universal literature have been beggars themselves—famous, by the way, not because of their material condition, but because of the greatness of their works. And then we discover how incapable we have become of enduring misery, since little things bother us a lot, and a fraction of the adversity endured by so many of our ancestors would be enough to wipe us out. At least the embarrassing is useful.