Beech Trees

The early settlers in this colony greatly missed—that is, those who had eyes for such things—the change of the seasons which marked the year in the land of their birth, and which helped so greatly to diversify their life in the old home. They noticed that the weather got colder as the Autumn waned and the Winter came on, and again as the days lengthened there was a gradual increase in warmth; but the erratic nature of our climate, which often gives us an Indian summer in mid-winter and then freezes us up in the middle or end of our Spring, took away from the sharpness of the impression, and Nature helped but little to deepen it.

Quotation from:  A New Zealand Naturalist’s Calendar: and notes by the wayside by George Malcolm Thomson. Dunedin, 1909

No doubt therefore this is why the early settlers planted European beech trees, seen here in full autumn glory. Compare with the New Zealand native Southern beech tree to the left of this picture.

Knowledge

Knowledge, it is rightly said, does not stand outside of practical activity: it is made and sustained through situated practical activity.

Yet, despite the chorus of modern voices commending detailed study of the particularities by which knowledge is made, protected, and transmitted, advocacy largely remains at a programmatic and abstract level.

A view about knowledge and practical activity which seems to demand the historian's finest microscope is largely fobbed off with traditional philosopher's toy-examples and socail theorist's impenetrably airy generalities. This is both odd and deeply unsatisfactory.

Quotation from: A Social History of Truth: Civility & Science in Seventeenth-century England. by Steven Shapin, 1994, University of Chicago Press.

Ink People

The characters in fiction are just wiggles of ink on paper (or chemical stains on celluloid). They are ink people. They live in ink houses inside ink towns. They work at ink jobs. They have inky problems. They sweat ink and cry ink, and when they are cut they bleed ink. And yet ink people press effortlessly through the porous membrane separating their inky world from ours. They move through our flesh-and-blood world and wield real power in it. As we have seen, this is spectacularly true of sacred fictions. The ink people of scripture have a real presence in our world. They shape our behaviours and our customs, and in so doing, they transform societies and histories.

Quotation: The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make us Human. By Jonathan Gottschall. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012

The Truth is Sometimes Told

An historian must assume that truth is sometimes told. He must, assuming that, argue from probabilities, and, keeping in view the social forces operating in his own time, ask himself what was likely to have occurred in the past. This is what we see done. There are histories of England, of Australia, of the Jews. Now the books of the Bible that relate history are few. And unless we are to believe that all the events recorded as historical are absolutely true, the history books do not seem to me of a very high order. There is a want of philosophical grasp and outlook. In many cases they are dry chronicles of kings and war, and of the efforts of priests and prophets. They lack all the most interesting parts of history the record of the rise and development of the morals, the intelligence, the industry, and the wealth of the nation. But, as it happens, it is only of late that it has been recognised that true history is not wholly concerned about kings and battles.

…

The Bible was not written all at once. With it, as with other things, we behold a growth. It partakes, therefore, of the nature of other works. We do not find anything has happened like the fabled Minerva. Wisdom does not come all at once. The history of the Bible shows that it was only bit by bit compiled, and its history is the history of everything around us.

Quotation from: Address delivered by Robert Stout at the opening of the 1880 session of the Freethought Association.[Dunedin, New Zealand]

Otago Daily Times 21 February 1880

How to Write History

'I let it be a dull book, recording merely such uncontroversial facts as, for example, that so-and-so married so-and-so, the daughter of such-and-such who had this or that number of public honours to his credit, but not mentioning the political reasons for the marriage nor the behind-the-scene bargaining between the families. Or I would write that so-and-so died suddenly, after eating a dish of African figs, but say nothing of poison, or to whose advantage the death proved to be, unless they were supported by a verdict of the Criminal Courts.
I told no lies, but neither did I tell the truth in the sense that I mean to tell it here. ... it is myself writing as I feel, and as the history proceeds the reader will be more ready to believe that I am hiding nothing – so much being to my discredit.
This is a confidential history. But who, it may be asked, are my confidants? My answer is: it is addressed to posterity. I do not mean my great-grandchildren, or my great-great-grandchildren: I mean an extremely remote posterity. Yet my hope is that you, my eventual readers of a hundred generations ahead, or more, will feel yourselves directly spoken to, as if by a contemporary: as often Herodotus and Thucydides, long dead, seem to speak to me.'
Quotation from: I Claudius by Robert Graves