A few days ago I was struck by a
deeply melancholy thought. It happened during the morning rush hour as I stood
in a crowded Tube train. A feeling of complete detachment came over me. I was
aware of the jolting motion of the carriage passing through the darkened tunnel
and all the people hemmed in around me. They all seemed to be wrapped up in the
cares of the here and now. People who had given time and careful thought to the
clothing they wore. Presentable and business-like. Some were absorbed in copies
of the morning Metro. Some were busy
with whatever functions of their mobile phones would still work underground.
Others were already at work with pen and sheaf of business papers or reports, a
few typing on laptops. Some were students studying. A group of suited business
men and women stood close by, discussing impending business meetings, financial
strategies and sales forecasts in voices raised over the familiar rattle and
whine of the train as it hurtled along its tunnel. Suddenly, everything that
was going on around me in that carriage seemed so intense and involved, so
vitally important, and so utterly of that particular
moment. It gave me pause to wonder, and the following thought occurred: Who in a hundred years time would know or
care what any of us did that day?
I realise that such a thought could
certainly carry a weight of despondency or even despair. An existential stab
leaving a bleeding wound of solipsistic nihilism. But the thought arose more
from my concerns with the past rather than the present. And this is perhaps one
of the profound pleasures that the pursuit of history can engender. The past we
are told can teach us about the here and now, and perhaps it can even tell us
something of the patterns which may very well shape or create our future.
The prompt to my sudden detachment
and its portentous reflection upon the present moment in that crowded railway
carriage was in fact derived from a particular project of research. Research
can be (and almost always is) an all-consuming enterprise. It fills one’s
waking thoughts, both conscious and unconscious; and it can even invade one’s
sleeping thoughts as well. This research project is concerned with retracing
and piecing together the story of a life lived almost a hundred years ago. And
at that particular moment my mind was focussed on – if not exactly a time, then
certainly a place which coincided with my own world. That place being London.
When I got off the train and
ascended the stairs of Temple Tube Station, I was stepping out into the streets
which the subject of my research had mentioned in his autobiographical writings.
This was the city in which he had passed some of the formative years I was then
focussing upon in my research. In his half-finished memoir he had mentioned
Drury Lane and several of the theatres thereabouts. Drury Lane was a street I
was about to walk up, just as I always do each day, on my way to work.
Naturally, my eye often scans the buildings as I go by, trying to guess their age
from the style of architecture. That particular day, as I did this I found
myself wondering which of them might have been standing when the subject of my
research had himself wandered along this pavement.
My life it seems has been centred upon
such a contemplation of the past. It’s the essence of a wider field to which
I’ve devoted myself. The past, and ways of looking at and discovering the past,
are what I chose to study at school and university; and it is what I’ve since
been employed to do, working in a museum. Archaeology is the painstaking
piecing together of the past from fragments and interpretation. By comparison,
research into the more recent past one would think might be a lot easier, or at
least a lot less vague. One would think that plentiful archival, documentary
evidence from the century just ended would make creating such a picture of the
recent past a relatively simple thing – but the truth is, my present research
has shocked me at the fact that this isn’t at all the case. Archaeology has
taught me that whole worlds can pass into near complete inexistence, but my
present research has taught me that worlds vanish far faster than I had
assumed.
The life I am looking at is only
some three generations or so back. That is to say the generations of our
grandparents or our great-grandparents. It’s a very particular threshold of
history and I acknowledge that the parameters and limitations which apply here
may not apply to future generations researching our own time and our lives. The
early years of the twentieth century witnessed a number of significant advances
which mean we are able to hear and see the distant past for the reality it once
was in recorded audio and film. It has given us a quaint and perhaps wistful
sense of what we think the world would then have been like. But it is a mirage.
We can’t know what their world was like in the same way that we know our own, not
in the same way that we perceive ourselves, standing each day in the Tube
carriage, overhearing others discussing the dynamic imperatives of their day-to-day
business and social lives. It is something that history in its relation to the
here and now cannot deny. All reality is lived essentially to be lost.
The life I am researching is one
that was lived in the time of colonial ambition and the daily reality of an established
empire. It was a life which partook of that ethos and actually implemented its
ethic as part of our government’s diplomatic service. My research has lead me
to look in depth at the world of that time from the personal viewpoint of this person
who intimately inhabited it. After leaving London, the imperial capital, he
went to China. He lived the foreigner’s world of China in the treaty ports, as
they were then known. The semi-colonial settler society of Shanghai, the “Paris
of the East.” These were people forging a world of their own, for good or ill
as posterity now reflects, far from their native place – in someone else’s
nation. But they too, like the people in my railway carriage, thought their
business and day-to-day lives were dynamic and important. They spoke of things
as though they really mattered and always would matter. Little did they know
that by the mid-point of their century, the certainty of that future and their
faith in progress would be radically shaken up and almost entirely shattered.
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| Sheltering in the London Tube during an air raid in World War Two |
As I say, whole world’s can vanish,
and sometimes very quickly. The lives of individuals even more so. In fact, it
is a wonder to me that anything of ourselves lasts at all. Just think of the
countless generations of our distant ancestors of whom we know absolutely
nothing. It’s remarkable to think that any of us might be remembered beyond the
immediate generations who knew us. In the course of human history, for the
great majority of people, the significance of their personal lives is lost, not
in the passing of an age, but in an instant. It is a sad and melancholy
thought. Who in a hundred years will know
or care what any of us did today?
Or is it? – Perhaps it is if you are preoccupied with the search for
historical facts or insights into the lives of people long since passed. Or,
perhaps, if you are concerned with your own prospects of immortality,
particularly in our own time when the hankering for our own personal “fifteen
minutes of fame” has seemingly never before been so widespread nor so ardently
desired. Perhaps not though, when one considers all those generations of
anonymous ancestors who have lived countless lives before us as part of that
continuum of the self which has culminated – at least at the present time – in
us personally and the lives which ultimately we lead only for ourselves. And
there are advantages in anonymity.
The contemplation of history, I
find, can be as interesting and even as enthralling as all that history itself
contains. To return to an essential point from an altered angle, without
history we can’t truly know who we are or where we – and the world we live in –
might be going. Who does not delight to hear our grandparents speak of their
own early lives and in our hearts and minds to compare and contrast ourselves
to them at a similar age? And with present technologies changing at such a fast
pace we can now all say that we remember the world before the invention of such
and such a … [fill in the blank, as you wish].
History is in some senses the
leap-frogging of memory. The time-machine equivalent of the theory of the six
degrees of separation. Our grandparents told us of the early years of the last
century, and the great events of their time – the two world wars, for instance.
But we forget that their grandparents before them – as Thomas Hardy once marvelled
of his own grandparents – could tell of the wars of the Napoleonic era. Worlds
do disappear perhaps faster than we realise, but we can also reach back further
than we might have suspected if only we took the time to stop and see. More so
even if we take some time to stop and perhaps make only the smallest record of
ourselves and the life we are living for those who are as yet still to follow;
those who may well one day – in a hundred years perhaps – want to look back and
find us, who may in time seek to know something of a world which has all but
vanished in its turn. In that sense, then, my morning’s melancholy commute, has
perhaps – for a moment at least – transformed a Tube train into a time machine.
Perhaps one day it may well help to transport someone back to our own time – I can’t
help wondering, what sort of world they will imagine it to have been?
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