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.

A train encounter

A little boy - two years old, maybe three - was travelling on a Tokyo train with his father - a tall, bearded man, who was reading a book in Arabic and paid little attention to his son. The man had silver streaks in his beard - if it was not for the way the boy called him - baba, which, as far as I know, means "father" in Arabic-speaking lands - I would easily have taken him for the little boy's grandfather.

The boy was cute, his smile was sweet and his soft brownish hair fluttered under the breath of train ventilation. He prattled unintelligible words to himself, sang childish songs. At times he fell silent and studied with his innocent round eyes the surrounding bustle, the sleepless metropolis and its inhabitants on various errands on a warm Saturday evening. I couldn't get my eyes off of him. Inside, I wished him a long and beautiful life - he felt my gaze and stared back with curious eyes, not knowing that the words I hastily jotted down in my notebook were about him. His father kept on reading his book with enthusiasm.

I thought about the boy for a moment, about the way he made me reach for my bag for a pen and paper. The way he inspired me. I imagined a world depraved of this kind of inspiration - the world of a desk and a chair in a quiet, gloomy room. Of pale paper and a lonely pen that runs back and forth on it, without touching the real world, detached from the things outside of it. This made me think about the importance of seeing other people. I thought about Auster, his long walks on New York streets, his fondness for observing people.

At one station the boy got off his seat and straddled hesitatingly towards a rail handle in the centre of the car. The train was motionless and the boy almost made it, his eyes glowing with adventurous joy. I watched him with a smile, encouraging him to take the challenge with my sympathetic eyes. But right at the moment he extended his white plumpy hand towards the rail the train launched abruptly towards the next station. The boy's face changed immediately: the expression of alert took the place of adventure and he quickly climbed back into the safety of his train seat. The father had at last noticed he was not travelling alone; he picked the boy up into his lap. For the rest of the journey the boy cuddled there, his eyes moving thoughtfully from one commuter to another. He saw me off with his eyes, when I got up and off the train on Tokyo station.