“For four years in the 1980s, I wrote a film column for The Spectator. Eight hundred words were requested, and though from time to time I turned in 799, I was seldom expansive to the tune of 801. After a while I didn’t even have to use a word count function. All my views–on anything–fitted into 800 words. ‘Should we be in Iraq?’ Eight hundred words. ‘Is it cold out?’ Eight hundred words. Then, for a while, I wrote an opinion column, successfully concealing the fact that I had no opinions–or at least, not of the sort broadsheet editors want. If I were to be granted a coat of arms–an unlikely scenario, I admit–my motto would be ‘It’s not that simple’. Being a novelist has taught me, if I didn’t know before, that almost all human situations are complex, ambiguous and shifting. There is always more information, and more emerging information, than you can process, but the crudities of public debate require oppositional postures, the drawing of lines in the dust.”
– Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of my Former Self
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“The materiality of this first moment is so obvious that some of us take it for granted. It does not imply that facts are meaningless objects waiting to be discovered under some timeless seal but rather, more modestly, that history begins with bodies and artifacts: living brains, fossils, texts, buildings.The bigger the material mass, the more easily it entraps us: mass graves and pyramids bring history closer while they make us feel small. A castle, a fort, a battlefield, a church, all these things bigger than we that we infuse with the reality of past lives, seem to speak of an immensity of which we know little except that we are part of it. Too solid to be unmarked, too conspicuous to be candid, they embody the ambiguities of history. They give us the power to touch it, but not that to hold it firmly in our hands—hence the mystery of their battered walls. We suspect that their concreteness hides secrets so deep that no revelation may fully dissipate their silences. We imagine the lives under the mortar, but how do we recognize the end of a bottomless silence?”
– Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
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We can never know all the facts.
There is no perfect knowledge.
Often what we can find has been fashioned by its creator to fit into their own agenda.
Our lives shouldn’t be spent as preservation machines.
Not every conversation needs to be recorded.
Not every building is precious.
There has to be some curation. Or rather, a lot of curation.
How do I choose two quotes?
What makes Hilary and Michel-Rolph worthy of preservation in this blog?
Because they have snagged on a jagged edge of my subconscious.
I know they both speak to the complexities of the world and that any attempts to wrangle truth is a mighty strenuous job.
But if we all truthfully engage in what truly engages and interests us, then ours will be a happy entrapment in the mire of our reality.
I cannot know all people from all times and all places but I can invite the ones I meet along the way to help broaden my own world view.
I don’t need to judge and categorise everything I see.
A simple conversation will suffice.
Conversations With Quotations 