Published by Justin Lewis-Anthony on 30 May 2008 at 09:30 am
Commonplace (20)
Not understanding the past
Understanding the past requires pretending that you don’t know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination. That’s a harder thing to do than [many] seem to think.
Paul Fussell, ‘Thank God for the Atom Bomb’ in Killing in Verse and Prose and Other Essays, 1988
