There are a couple of notions that have been buzzing round in my head recently.
The first comes from Chris Stewart's Driving Over Lemons and concerns an illiterate peasant recounting tales for pleasure.
Manuel's stories were too good to doze through. He told them well, fluently and with a fine sense of balance and dramatic timing. Those who cannot read or write have the advantage in this; the ability to keep a long story in one's head tends to diminish with literacy.
The other is a quotation from the American philosopher, George Santayana, in his book Reason in Common Sense.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
History as I was taught it at school included a fair amount about the Romans but that really only went up to the end of the first century. There was then a massive jump via a brief stopover with the Vikings to 1066. A little about Medieval agricultural practices with strip farming and crop rotation, perhaps a quick mention of Agincourt and then it was the War of the Roses in preparation for Henry VIII and the Reformation. Then history really started.
Or perhaps it would be more true to say that British Protestant history and British imperial history started.
My recently acquired interest in history prompts me to ask all sorts of questions about that missing chunk of the long story after the Romans. It was, I was taught, The Dark Ages; a time of no history. And yet, as I am becoming aware, this is a bundle on nonsense
In post-Enlightenment times, our beliefs are based on the empirical and evidential. But what if an age does not leave the sort of evidence which we value? If you are nomadic, then your dwellings are either portable or are made of materials that decay. Unlike the pyramids or the Greek temples, they will not survive the millennia. And, if you are nomadic, then any artifacts which you do produce will be widely dispersed rather than being concentrated in permanent dwelling spots.
And if, furthermore, your culture is based on an oral rather than a written tradition, then you will not leave a tangible record of words. And, Post-Reformation, we place a great emphasis on The Word.
So your culture is ignored and eradicated because it doesn't offer the type of evidence we prefer.
But then there was a very definite culture that operated throughout the whole of the first millennium which left a richly recorded verbal tradition and many tangible artifacts in well preserved habitations. But it was Ecclesiastical and Catholic to boot. And, in the educational world I was brought up in, Church history did not exist either. Which was a more sinister eradication because it willfully chose to ignore the past and perpetuate a cultural revolution which has been in train since the Great Schism of 1534 with the Act of Supremacy.
Listening to The Long Search on Radio 4 - programmes about spirituality in Britain over the past 2000 years - there was a comment in the final programme about a gradual re-Catholicisation of Britain. Small evidences were given such as the Prince of Wales listening to Catholic sermons. I think the larger evidence can be seen in the behaviour of the people. How many wells and fountains contain coins cast into them? How many floral roadside shrines have recently sprung up to mark another dead pedestrian? Deep seated spirituality of a Catholic and pre-Catholic nature.
Maybe the time is coming, after 500 years of Protestantism, to reintegrate the previous 1500 years of lost British history. Are those who know the long story already looking towards 2034? Will that be the year that King William V kisses the Pope's ring and Ireland is re-united?
Mind you, as I said to Ross recently,
this sort of Olympian vision is symbolically pertinent for someone who is
long-sighted. The corollary is that I tend to miss the things that are right
under my nose.
Already ducks are massing to begin their long migratory flights and the sun is discernibly lower in the skies.