A saeculum is a measure of time which spans the period from the event until the last person who witnessed or lived through that event or epoch has died.
I learned this from Nathan Heller's rambling Personal History "Tribes" in the August 6 New Yorker.
It's a concept with great appeal, because it suggests that all our attempts at history, recording and discussing past things, are flawed and only those who actually experienced the events can speak with real authority about them.
Of course, there is the problem of Rashomon, the great 1950 film in which 4 witnesses describe a murder entirely differently, exploring the impossibility of completely objective observation, as perception, personal point of view affect the experience and memory of events.
But now, I have lived through "history" and I remember the 1960's from my own distinct and limited perspective and seeing how those times are presented even by the most intelligent historians, like Ken Burns, I see how very subjective "history" is. Oliver Stone's "Untold History of the United States" is another take on things I remember,suffused with things of which I was unaware, and am not really sure are actually true, and Howard Zinn wrote of years which I had studied but hardly recognized in his rendition in "A People's History of the United States," told from the perspective of labor unionists and the underclass.
I can only imagine how Trump will be presented, when all of us who are now living through his joke of a Presidency are gone, and history is told for us by our posterity.
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| Lockhouse 8, C&O Canal, Obadiah Youngblood |
I learned this from Nathan Heller's rambling Personal History "Tribes" in the August 6 New Yorker.
It's a concept with great appeal, because it suggests that all our attempts at history, recording and discussing past things, are flawed and only those who actually experienced the events can speak with real authority about them.
Of course, there is the problem of Rashomon, the great 1950 film in which 4 witnesses describe a murder entirely differently, exploring the impossibility of completely objective observation, as perception, personal point of view affect the experience and memory of events.
But now, I have lived through "history" and I remember the 1960's from my own distinct and limited perspective and seeing how those times are presented even by the most intelligent historians, like Ken Burns, I see how very subjective "history" is. Oliver Stone's "Untold History of the United States" is another take on things I remember,suffused with things of which I was unaware, and am not really sure are actually true, and Howard Zinn wrote of years which I had studied but hardly recognized in his rendition in "A People's History of the United States," told from the perspective of labor unionists and the underclass.
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| North Hampton Rte 1A, Obadiah Youngblood |
I can only imagine how Trump will be presented, when all of us who are now living through his joke of a Presidency are gone, and history is told for us by our posterity.
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