Helprin

"How can you know history? You can only imagine it. Anchored though you may be in fact and docuument, to write a history is to write a novel with checkpoints, for you must subject the real and absolute truth, too wide and varied for any but god to comprehend, to the idiosyncratic constraints of your own understanding. A "definitive" history is only one in which someone has succeeded not in recreating the past but in casting it according to his own lights, in defining it. Even the most vivid portrayal must be full of sorrow, for it illuminates the darkness of memory with mere flashes and sparks, and what the past begs for is not a few bright pictures but complete reconstitution. Short of that, you can only follow the golden threads, and they are always magnificently tangled."


August 16, 1997