To a historian there is never an end to the past.
A. B. Yehoshua
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Historians are psychologists.
I am in awe of some of the discoveries that have gone on and are still going on as people uncover things from the past that nobody knew were there. Men dig up the ground to build a new tunnel for a subway and find an ancient village. A strange artifact is found in a remote desert area, archeologists arrive and dig around it finding the tomb of some forgetter potentate. In today's news is such a discovery in Egypt of a buried pyramid.
Somewhere else a grave is opened to exhume the body of some important figure of the past only to find that there was no one buried there.
Think of the mysteries that lie hidden in the ground you may be walking on, the roots of our civilization that haven't been discovered, and when they are will rewrite and redefine the movements, forces and connections that made that history.
Think of the mysteries that still lie on the bottoms of the oceans and lakes. People are always finding ships that were long forgotten, containing treasures of things that past humans made and used. It's estimated that what has been brought up from the ocean floor is a small fraction of what is still down there and may never be found.
Each new discovery either affirms or casts doubt on what historians have accepted as the facts. And often those discoveries explain other seemingly unrelated events as they have played out over the years.
A psychologist or psychiatrist will dig around in your own past to find the thoughts or connections of one thought with another that produced the conditions of which you are painfully aware, but will find that those thoughts and connection are buried in an unconscious place of which you are unaware.
The older we get the more we may look back on our lives, but what we see is generally the results and not the causes of our behavior and circumstances. The real thoughts and connections are still buried, waiting to be discovered.
DB - The Vagabond
2 comments:
When I used to play chess (badly) I would try to get into an opponents head, by saying 'your mistake await you, eager to be made'.
History, personal or societal, is the review of 'what was waiting to be made', by the consequence of the actions
I love thinking about things like this, D. Who knows what treasures lie beneath?!
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