Why History?
“The past flows seamlessly into the present, regardless of any dam myself or humanity itself may construct.”
All my life, I have loved history. Even as a child only covering the same few watered-down aspects of early America for years on end, learning it captivated me in a way nothing else did. Eventually, I found periods that better suited my interest—Medieval Europe, Tokugawa Japan, Gilded Age America—and that fascination only grew. I poured over Wikipedia page after Wikipedia page. My local librarians knew me by name. I descended down a truly concerning quantity of YouTube rabbit holes. I read so extensively on the sinking of the Titanic, I gave myself a fear of boats that’s lasted to this day.
It was a habit far beyond the self-professed understanding of my parents, much less the kids my age. Enough so that I often found myself faced with the same question: Why? Or, more specifically: Why history?
If I am compelled to answer honestly, I must admit that my dedication was not entirely born from some insatiable hunger for learning. Rather, it was fed more so by my inability to stomach anything else. For years history served as a welcome respite from the real world I so struggled to understand.
When I cracked the spine of a new chronicle, I was welcomed into a world frozen in time: a place where the past stretched endlessly before me, preserved for my perusal. It had nowhere to go. I believed it had nothing to hide. If I found an unfamiliar term, there were a thousand places I could find its meaning. I could go over the same time period or event—sometimes even the very same text—over and over again until I felt I understood it in its entirety. Until I found the familiar shape of its name soothing.
Present life and the people that populated it were not so predictable. If history was a placid lake, then present life was a rushing river. One that refused to wait for me, much less submit to my understanding — understanding that otherwise seemed to elude me entirely. On the winding path of the present there were no signposts, no landmarks from which I could orient myself. In real life, I couldn’t just flip back a page in hopes of tracking down where I’d lost the plot or thread of conversation. I was simply lost, out of place and out of time, a foreign tourist hopelessly adrift without a clue how to speak like the locals did. I was left only to make clumsy attempts at their customs, trying vainly to twist my tongue around the strange pattern of their language, doomed to return to the crystallized world in my books like always. For a while, I turned away almost entirely from real life and the incomprehensible creatures that were other people. If you would have asked me “why history?” at my worst I would have asked you just one thing in return: what else is there?
The answer is nothing. But not for the reason I thought.
As much as I loved history then, I also fundamentally misunderstood it. I considered history to be something entirely distinct from the world I knew — or, rather, didn’t know. I thought of it as the lake—a stagnant, solitary, self-contained thing—when it was really not so different from the river I so feared. The past flows seamlessly into the present, regardless of any dam myself or humanity itself may construct. The past dogs our heels, its tide rising beneath our feet. We cannot disentangle ourselves from it any more than we can separate each droplet from a waterfall. As a child, this had slipped my mind. The idea that history existed not only in the dusty books I so cherished, but in everything else around me, didn’t occur to me until the precise moment it did. Until I found myself reading and laughing along at a primary source, the formal-yet-playful writings of a teenage noble girl hundreds of years ago, and thinking we could’ve been friends. Until I recognized the intimate patterns of time not only in the identical rise and fall of empires, but in that essential aspect of humanity we all seem to share, no matter the nuances of seemingly disparate societies, fashions, or faiths. With this new context, I felt as if I could suddenly put what I did not understand into terms that I did. I began to bridge the gap I’d so-long found entirely impassable, stepping over the threshold of time and back into the land of the living.
And so the only answer I can give to “why history?” must be: how could I not? How could I not choose history over and over, out of everything, when history itself is everywhere — not only in the literal sense I’ve just described, but in the more intimate one? In the intricate interweaving between history, the world, and the way I have finally come to understand the people in it?
Ryan Falkin is a Fall 2024 finalist for the Rutgers Writing Centers’ First-Year Writing Spotlights. This initiative invites instructors to nominate students for outstanding work on a piece of reflective writing in their first-year College Writing course. To read more of the nominated essays, click here!