The Past is Filled with Echoes

As all historians know the past is a great darkness and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come. And try as we may, we cannot always decipher them preciously in the clearer light of our own day.

Margaret Atwood in “The Handmaid’s Tale” 

We can read the stories and thoughts that have been recorded throughout history, but we can never really understand their experience unless we lived then. History is like a flavor that can be described but cannot really be known unless it is tasted.

This quote is for July 24, 2017.