Where Here Is, Sort Of
June 30th, 2009 | Published in Amici, Florilegium, Mysteria, Signs
I’ve been reading a lot of the Atlas Obscura of late, thinking about the job of cataloging the irretrievable, unmanageable past. This morning, my daily email from the New York Times included the headline “A Historian Is On A Quest To Locate Lost Events,” which piqued my inner amateur historian quite a bit.
Unfortunately, the questing soul featured in the article, Andrew Carroll, runs only a spartan website on which there’s little actual lost-event locating to be found. He mentions a blog but doesn’t link to it. Weird.
Weirder, perhaps, is Carroll’s URL, “hereiswhere.org/Here_Is_Where/Here_Is_Where.” Why the deuce, the rhizomatist wonders, would you not forge ahead simply with “hereiswhere.org,” an elegant, koan-like URL? Or even “hereiswhere.org/home,” a nod to convention? Or might I suggest “hereiswhere.org/whereishere/hereiam,” or some other act of play?
Officially, all word-hijinks aside, I salute Carroll and his ilk for wandering down that hallway of the past. My only admonition, I borrow from novelist Andrei Bitov, who writes in Pushkin House:
He expresses the evasively simple idea that it is equally false, if not more so, to infer a historical picture of a given age solely from data that are few and extremely meager. The contemporary of an age and his historian move toward each other in darkness, but this is a bizarre simultaneity, for the contemporary exists no more, and the historian not yet. The few things that the historian sees when he looks back are too clear to him; to the contemporary, they are engulfed by life. Why, one might ask, if a scholar succeeds in establishing something with precision, does it seem to have become more obvious and better known in the past? The scholar, more often than the dramatist, succumbs to the delusion that every gun fires.
