One of my greatest pleasures in life is, and always has been, reading first-person accounts written throughout history. People and events as viewed and experienced directly by the writer. Letters of a Civil War Nurse: Cornelia Hancock, 1863-1865, for instance. To this day I remember my deeply visceral reaction when reading that book as a teenager (which began my love for such source material). Cornelia was a highly sheltered young Quaker from a tiny northern town, who boarded a train to Gettysburg and upon arrival plunged straight into nursing the men horribly wounded in battle. Her observations and experiences, as well her intense satisfaction in finding her purpose, are stunning.
People don’t know history. Most people these days dismiss history as irrelevant, boring, useless, and any other adjective of disdain that come to mind. And it seems trite and hackneyed to say that people who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, because the thought has been repeated so widely and so often. But the truth of that statement is profound. Take the recent events at Stanford Law School, when law students in significant numbers shrieked, screamed, and cursed at a federal judge with whom they didn’t agree. Truly vile behavior, some of them audibly hoping that the judge’s daughters would be raped. And, even more stunning and disturbing, after Dean Martinez apologized to the judge for their behavior, those same students subjected her to a gauntlet of fascist intimidation that almost defies belief. And yet it happened.
Does anyone doubt that those students, those malignant narcissists, are the same type who led struggle sessions in Maoist China, who sentenced political dissidents to cruelly hard labor in frozen Siberia during the Soviet era, who rounded up Jews and sent them to death camps? Some might say that this comparison is too harsh, but I don’t think so. Watch the videos of those Standford law students. Feel their erupting hatred. Hatred. Pure hatred. Because someone disagrees with their opinions. Hatred like that has no boundaries, no limitations, no hint of finer perception. Stanford should expel the lot of them, for violating multiple school policies. But Stanford won’t. Because Stanford doesn’t know or care about history. Because Stanford is training those fascists to run this country’s entire legal system in the future. Those people who hope for the rape of innocents, they will become our leaders, assuming positions of great power over us.
I digress somewhat. This has become a stream-of-consciousness post. I will return to history, because everything in its turn reflects what has already happened, many times, throughout the millennia.
One immediately apparent aspect of historical first-person accounts: people never change. People are people, always have been and always will be. People who lived thousands of years ago are no different from you and I living here today. Trappings of societies shift over time, social mores vary from place to place and era to era, but those are merely transient aspects that change, sometimes quickly. But people never do.
The Persian Expedition, by Xenophon, (aka Anabasis), is my current read. Xenophon relates events that occurred in 401 B.C., more than 2400 years ago. Greek military contingents fought alongside Prince Cyrus in his bid to overthrow his brother Artaxerxes, King of Persia, and assume his throne. After Cyrus was killed in the first battle, the Ten Thousand Greek warriors, finding themselves stranded in the middle of Persian territory, proceeded to march through vast deserts and over snowy mountain ranges, from deep within the land to the coast of the Black Sea, while fighting hostile forces all along the way. It was an epic feat. Xenophon, a young Athenian nobleman, describes it beautifully. But some of the most engaging parts of his account are not the fraught, sweeping events, but the glimpses into particular people, including himself. These are his own thoughts right after Cyrus dies, as he contemplates the possibility of his taking command (their commanders having been captured and/or killed) and leading the soldiers the very long way to safety through a strange land, rather than surrendering:
As soon as he woke up the first thing that came into his head was this: What am I lying here for? The night is passing and at dawn the enemy will probably be here. If we fall into the King’s hands, there is nothing to prevent us from seeing the most terrible things happening, from suffering all kinds of tortures and from being put to death in ignominy. Yet so far from anyone bothering to take any steps in our defence, we are lying here as though we had a chance of enjoying a quiet time. What city, then, do I expect will produce the general to take the right steps? Am I waiting until I become a little older? I shall never be any older at all if I hand myself over to the enemy today.*
This passage is remarkable for the very fact that it is unremarkable. Xenophon was an ancient Greek warrior, and yet we here today, 2400 years later, understand instantly what he was feeling. Fear of capture by the enemy and the ensuing horrors. The uncertainty of how to proceed—fight, flee, or surrender—as the enemy draws nearer. And the dawning realization that he must step forth and lead the men if they hope to survive, even as he doubts his youthful fitness to do so. 2400 years’ distance means nothing. Xenophon is real and immediate, speaking to us as we sit here.
Xenophon and the other warriors are interesting, but the more fascinating people in the story are barely mentioned. On occasion Xenophon alludes to the large groups of women, servants, and slaves who accompanied the Ten Thousand, but only in passing reference, not in detail. I want to know about them. They would have led extremely difficult lives, excruciating really, apart from the hardships of the march through Persia to the Black Sea. I want to know about them, their lives and their travails. I want to know what they thought, felt, hoped, and experienced. But I never will. We never will.
The fact of that sometimes drives me a little crazy. That billions of people across the world and throughout time have lived lives of quiet desperation, before passing away unnoticed, soon forgotten. Billions whose lives mattered just as much as ours, but we will never know anything real and immediate about them, because they couldn’t write their stories.
In an odd way that is a good thing to understand. That I, myself, as important as my life seems to me, am just another one among billions, soon to be forgotten though I do have the ability to put pen to paper. Billions of us have lived, and billions will die, this life just the briefest blip within something eternal.
And history repeating itself, that, too, is useful to realize. Nothing we do will stop people from being people, from making the same mistakes over and over for millennia. Raging against that truth, hoping that people, overall, will change for the better, is its own form of madness.
Which is not to say that we shouldn’t try. We, as individual people, should always try to do the right best thing, both within ourselves and for the people and society around us. Being people of integrity is the only thing we can control, so do it, and do it well. But as for everyone and everything around us, we can’t control any of it. Influence, maybe, offering a better option and example, perhaps causing some small change for the better on occasion. But control? Never. Expecting to control anything is another form of madness, which only leads to suffering.
Stream of consciousness, as I said. I will leave you with this thought. Read a little history. Whatever location and era appeal to you. Because though people are deeply and permanently flawed, they are endlessly fascinating. And remember that even as our society collapses around us, the collapse is nothing new or extraordinary. Given history, it was entirely predictable.
* From the 1972 Penguin Classics edition of The Persian Expedition, by Xenophon.
Thank you. I've missed your writings.