The two voices of history

Abstract

The past is dead; by definition it no Ionger exists, yet sometimes it comes back to us so vividly that we feeI we are its prisoners. But if the past strikes us at times by its elusiveness and at others by its ineluctability, the paradox does' not lie perhaps in the past itself, but rather in men' s own attitudes towards it. Sometimes they wish to preserve it, to keep it intact forever: their closets are filled with bottles, oId clothes, conceaIed mementoes; their houses with oId clocks, medallions, portraits, shells; their churches with tombs, tabIets, brasses, regimentaI flags; their cities with monuments, museums, and arches.