Why People are Obsessed with History
History has always had an indefinable tug on my mental heartstrings. There’s something breathtaking about saturating yourself deep within an isolation wrought by time, distance and culture, unprecedented and unduplicated – glorified by disconnect.
My sister and I, like the average starry-eyed female, have dreamed of setting our courses across the world, and seeing in person the places we’ve only escaped to in books. It’s been said that if you have fallen in love with a place you’ve never been, that you should never go there. I suppose once the aura of mystery disintegrates so does much of the glory.
The grandeur of the Eiffel Tower shrinks when you’re physically surrounded by Parisian slums. Big Ben is not actually quite so big as you imagined. Foot-weary pilgrims find that the Pyramids are, after all, mere geometric giants of cracked rubble and dust. There will always be something to say of course about the air of excitement in the history of those places themselves – but once again, that excitement is only found in the glorification of ages past which penetrate our modern lenses.
As one historian says so eloquently:
“…there is something barbarically primitive – or barbarically modern – in this brute hunger for size. It is the memory and imagination of the beholder that, swollen with history, make these monuments great… Perhaps pictures have too much ennobled them: photography can catch everything but dirt, and enhances man-made objects with noble vistas of land and sky. The sunset at Gizeh is greater than the Pyramids.”
We crave novelty. Vastness. Grandeur. Exhausted by the ceaseless, babbling, vibrating thread of time in its constant unravel of day to day existence, we enjoy the bigger picture as we step back from the ticking of the clock, and see Time as an age rather than seconds – as something that exists apart from and despite the tangled web we weave.
Vainglories Past
Last fall, I went on a historical tour along the east coast with my mom, sister, and 87 year old great-grandmother. It was an amazing, breathtaking experience. We stood in the room where the Declaration of Independence was signed. We walked the fields of Gettysburg. We stood beside the bed where George Washington breathed his last breath. We ran our hands along the marble pillars of Jefferson’s magnificent Monticello. Our country is very young, yet even within the 200 years of time and distance that lengthens each second between America’s birth and her present, there is a beautiful, honorable glory that shrouds every pillar, every landmark, every grave.
Contrast our glorified memory to the ancient historical studies I am teaching my younger siblings. We recently read about the early tribes of the Mediterranean Coast during the time of Egypt – tribes that historic memory dismisses – the tribes that receive a generous half sentence, or their overlooked place in an insignificant list of groups believed to resemble their own. Some of them lasted over 200 years, and their birth, rise, and decline has been swallowed by their more popular precedents. Yet they were here, on this earth, for as long as America has waved her glorious flag. An America-sized span of history was overshadowed by pyramids and the hanging gardens in Babylon. We exaggerate or we forget.
History is clouded by distance and glorified by memory. The river of time flows ever-onward, and the past, as Durant again puts it so well:
“….flows into the future, lightly touching the present on its way. Only historians make divisions; time does not.”
The Surprise of the Present
Perhaps it is our prolific obsession with the ages of time, as we travel to, peer at, and parade around silent tombs of a century so distant to our own, that contrasts so distinctly with the ticking seconds of our every-day experience. As C.S. Lewis observed, we are ever and continuously surprised by the passing of time. It is grand in history, but as we witness the thriving enigmas of modernity wither into skeletons and pale with the ghosts of the past, we find it shocking, disturbing, and at times, even terrifying.
From a secular standpoint, which strives to explain all emotion from a simplified, bio-chemical process, this fear seems an evolutionary, ego-centric, rational, and above all natural response when we discover our lack of control over the gifts of life, comfort, and security which we hoard with often idolatrous jealousy. There may be something truthful, though fallen, in this observation. But from a Biblical standpoint, there is something deeper behind this prevailing disquietude.
The first thing C.S. Lewis observed about this feeling, is that it is not uniquely modern, or uniquely American, but it is uniquely human. Unlike what the secular world would like to promote as a natural response to our evolutionary ascent, Lewis believed this came, not from an upward scramble, but a downward descent. From an atheistic standpoint, time should not surprise us.
Time is more natural than our clutch on comfort, our human egoism, or even our hold on life itself. In an evolutionary ascent, time is the only ingredient which generates, activates, and solidifies. Cross-species genetics and ascents which would be impossible otherwise, become “scientifically possible ” with only the addition of time. If such were actually the case, we may find the passing of time and deterioration affronting, disturbing, but never surprising. Yet we visit a city after years of absence and wonder at “How much has changed since I was last here!” We see someone after years apart and exclaim, “How much you’ve grown!”
The effects of time continually astonished us. But why should should it? Time should be so naturally ingrained in our natures that it is as strange for us to be astounded by its presence as for a fish to be constantly surprised by the wetness of the water. As Lewis wryly observed, that would be a strange thing indeed, unless that fish were destined some day to be a land animal.
The Glories of the Future
Time feels strange because we are destined for eternity. It is not the ticking of the clock every second that holds our unwavering attention, it is Time in its immensity, in its ages glorified, in its monuments which show us a glimpse of passing shadows in the grand scheme of time’s vastness.
Deterioration, death, the monumental graveyards that appear before our eyes are disturbing, not because we are animal, but because we are made in the image of God and we know that this world is not the way its supposed to be. We glorify Time because we were created to be glorified outside of Time – in eternity. Our hope, our longing, our desires, do not point to the past or fade with the fleeting present, they point to the future, to the eternity for which we were created and which we, as Christians, will spend with God.
Soli Deo Gloria,
