dual personalities

History and tradition are not fashionable in academe at the moment, though thankfully they both remain popular just about everywhere else. In academia the Progressives have the floor and they think the past, like God, is dead. In reply, rather than rant, I refer to G.K. Chesterton, who rightly pointed out the importance of tradition (and by extension, history):

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.”

Hear, hear! Learn about your past and find out what the dead have to say — they speak volumes if you listen and use your imagination. Leave the comfort of your armchair (at least mentally), visit their landscapes, which were often harsh and unforgiving.

Site of the Battle of the Rosebud River 1876

Appreciate the challenges they faced, which were many and cruel, from war to illness, poverty, disappointment, and old age.

Arthur Newell Chamberlin (I) who fought at the Rosebud

In short, the very things that plague us still.

Caroline Hendren Chamberlin

If we gain nothing else from the exercise, at least we acquire perspective on our own transient lives, though I have to admit that I have always found comfort in the past. The dead are never cruel or petty or indifferent. They are whatever we want them to be (like it or not, however much one strives to be accurate and objective, one always sees through the lens of personal experience and the present).

Ethel Chamberlin

I like what Annie Dillard wrote:

Ours is a planet sown in beings. Our generations overlap like shingles. We don’t fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat’s stem slits the crest of the present.”

I don’t want to sound all heavy-duty doom and gloom, though. Our ancestors had plenty of fun and it is a good idea to remind ourselves to do it, too.

Guy and ANC Jr. c. 1911

Here’s to those who came before us and to everything they did (and managed not to do) so that we could be here now.