What are historians made of? Part 2

When I think about historians, I imagine a group of miners. They are just like your usual miners, wearing their helmets with headlights that send straight beams of light far into the darkness. This light cuts through the cave of the past, snatching tiny bits of history here and there. It also illuminates the way, so to say, retrospectively. Shows us how we came where we are.

I know it all sounds very cliche but this image helps me understand the broader picture, and I think it would be a good analogy to help students imagine the role of the historian. It is handy in outlining the limitations of history writing: no single historian can paint the whole picture with his lonely headlight in the vast and endless darkness. In that respect, every historian is like the blind man from the ancient story about the blind men and the elephant. Only a concerted effort among a group of like-minded scholars can reconstruct the past in a cohesive and meaningful way, but even then it is not guaranteed. Historians might end up as the proverbial blind men if they try too hard to define the whole elephant as one of its parts: its trunk, tail, or ears.

What are historians made of?

What does it mean to be a historian? Does it take a lot to become a good one? Are natural curiosity, good judgement, and passable writing skills enough? Can someone who is curious enough to ask interesting questions and patient enough to sit their arses down for hours every day doing tedious archival work and picking at sheet after ancient sheet of yellow paper write fascinating versions of the past? Are hard work and good imagination sufficient to reclaim from the darkness those little bits of light, hope, love?

Or is there something more that you need?

Can you really call yourself a historian if you cannot cry at the suffering of the generations before you? If the images of broken lives do not move you at all as you look down on them as specimens, objects of study, as mere material. If you can't see the pain, tears and suffering hidden behind every number in that neat table you included in your recent paper. If you can't hear in your mind the voices long lost, can't feel the fear felt long before you were born, can't imagine yourself in the place of thousands - millions - who were fed to the mincing machine of history...

Can you?