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?