As I approach the late afternoon of my life (I can almost feel the evening chill) and become more an "historical" personage and less a full-fledged participant in current events, my interest in history increases. After all, I'm on the cusp of becoming history, either being lost in it or remembered for a certain amount of time after my departure.(Given the intensity of actually living, being remembered might seen a small consolation, but what are you going to do?)
In short, I've lived long enough to embody an "historical" perspective. Ergo, my interest in history. It seems a more familiar, less forbidding place than the present.
But when I read (contemplate, mediate on?) a book of history, I'm also dealing with the idea of history. What is History, really? As an attempt to think about that I'll conclude with a quote from a book by Edward Hallet Carr published in 1961 (Does this already make it of questionable value? After all, it is more than 20 years old.):
All history is "contemporary history," declared Croce, meaning that history consists essentially in seeing the past through the eyes of the present and in the light of its problems, and that the main work of the historian is not to record, but to evaluate; for, if he does not evaluate, how can he know what is worth recording?
