ABSTRACT
Turning from history to memory is in some ways like stepping from twilight into sunlight. In the brightness of the day, we move around more assuredly because we can see – think we can see – our surroundings without difficulty. We may perhaps make mistakes in what we believe we may have seen, perception may deceive us, but the illumination of our conscious, living presence as – to use Patrick Hutton’s felicitous phrase – ‘timeful beings’1 makes the world of memory appear as a quite different place from the world of history. In that other world, the sun has long since set, the light has gone and we can no longer see directly; ‘It is at the edge of memory that the past recedes into strangeness and historians must become accustomed to its alien character.’2 To move around that past world, to recognize and to navigate its spaces, we now need artificial light, we need something to substitute for the sun. In the darkness, we must look elsewhere for illumination; we must look, as we have ever done, to the archive, to the documents of history, without which the events that happened before our own time would remain unlighted. In the present world, to pursue the metaphor, we have direct sunlight in the form of the mental illumination that we receive from the operation of memory, both of our own and of those with whom we share our temporal existence, across the course of our lives.
