History is a tangled skein

[alice wellintown]

Not a quote anyone here is expected to know, sorry. It is taken from
one of my favorite chapters of Adams's Education. At last, Adams seems
to have settled in to a career in The Press (an earlier chapter, the
text is more or less chronological, biographical) as a political
writer, but he is called to a position at Harvard college, where he is
given the impossible tak of teaching History. Adams, like Stencil and
more like Wicks Cherrycoke concludes:


"Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,—Tops and Hoops, forever
a-spin.... Alas, the Historian may indulge no such idle Rotating.
History is not Chronology, for that is left to lawyers,—nor is
Remembrance, for Remembrance belongs to the People. History can as
little pretend to the Veracity of the one, as claim the Power of the
other,—her Practitioners, to survive, must soon learn the arts of the
quidnunc, spy and Taproom Wit,—that there may ever continue more than
one life-line back into a Past we risk, each day, losing our forbears
in forever,— not a Chain of single Links, for one broken Link could
lose us All,—rather, a great disorderly Tangle of Lines, long and
short, weak and strong, vanishing into the Mnemonick Deep, with only
their Destination in common." (M&Dp.349)


Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only
in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be
left within the reach of anyone in Power,—who need but touch her, and
all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never been.
She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and
counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry Radius, Masters of
Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech
nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity,
of Government..." (p.350)

In the same Chapter (Failure), Adams heads out west with geologists to
study the tangled skein of rocks and stones. While he never pretends
to know much Geology, and while his knowledge of Darwin is a bit
muddled, his statement about the complexity of the earth preceding the
evolution of life is true in context. Unless of course, there is "a
soul in every stone."


On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 10:02 PM,  <malignd at aol.com> wrote:
> I don't know why you wrote this -- is it a quote I should know? -- but
> complexity does not precede evolution.
>
>  History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, andbreak when
> one has unravelled enough; but complexity precedesevolution.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Tue, Jul 27, 2010 9:34 pm
> Subject: History is a tangled skein
>
>
>  History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, andbreak when
> one has unravelled enough; but complexity precedesevolution.
>