Remembrance
I thoroughly enjoyed Craig Brown’s essay ‘Nothing is real’ in the TLS of 10 September 2021 (the paper takes a while to reach Norway). It’s one of those pieces one should re-read before writing anything about anything, or anybody, at all. I was struck by this quotation from the historian Lewis Namier, born Ludwik Bernstein Niemirowski and now perhaps most renowned – a fact that would have bemused them both – as the husband of Iulia de Beausobre:
‘One would expect people to remember the past and imagine the future, but in fact, when discoursing or writing about history, they imagine it in terms of their own experience […], they imagine the past and remember the future.’
Which is why it is so important to put historical remembrance to the test, especially when it is lodged in a profound sense of involvement, with individual and collective identities at stake.
