Monday, October 26, 2020

History

 

'Historical understanding is always situated and necessarily coloured by our present values and interests. Historical accounts are stories we tell to provide a coherent narrative about who we are and how, through interacting with each other and the world, we got here. Such stories are inherently retrospective - each community in each age will tell the story differently - and they are constructed. The only sense in which a historical narrative can “gets things right” is by telling a story which proves to be both acceptable and enabling to the members of a community; and the only sense in which one such narrative can be “better” than another is not by offering a more faithful description of the objective sequence of events, but rather by redescribing the events in a novel and helpful way.’  




James Conant. ‘Freedom, Cruelty and Truth: Rorty versus Orwell’. 
In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert B. Brandon. 
Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, 276.



Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus




Saturday, October 10, 2020

Timeless

 'The mere possibility that something of value will not fall under the rule of time - and here we need not raise the question of how that value originated, whether inherent or the creation of interpreters - is the real justification for our continuing the clamorous, opinionated conversation.'


Kermode, Frank.
 Forms of Attention
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 
1985, 91.