Eric Hobsbawm in his book Age of Capital quotes Pierre Nora as having written “Memory is life. It is always carried by groups of living people, and therefore it is in permanent evolution. It is subject to the dialectics of remembering and forgetting, unaware if its successive deformations, open to all kinds of use and manipulation. Sometimes it remains latent for long periods, then suddenly revives. History is always incomplete and problematic reconstruction of what is no longer there. Memory always belongs to our time and forms a lived bond with the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.”
Given the current times we live in, with ever increasing polarised world, with events and the past constantly being reconceptualised, one would assume studying history becomes ever more important, but we all know, there are very few professional historians and even lesser poets. World in state of global amnesia.
Nice quote / gloomy thoughts.
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