“If the modern man is indeed the heir of all the ages, he is often the kind of heir who tells the family solicitor to sell the whole damned estate, lock, stock, and barrel, and give him a little ready money to throw away at the races or night-clubs.” –G. K. Chesterton
In Boston, at the intersection of Washington Street and School Street, there is a humble brick building which was once called the Old Corner Bookstore. It housed the first bookstore to distribute American editions of the works of Charles Dickens. Its upper rooms were a favorite meeting-place of Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, and other legends of American literature. But there is no bookstore there anymore. The building still stands, but inside is a Chipotle.
The tragedy here is not so much that there is a modern chain restaurant occupying this historic site. The building has many sections that have housed various businesses; the bricks and mortar are serving much the same purpose they always did in that respect. There is a touch more tragedy in the fact that many people likely walk in, buy a burrito, and walk out without knowing a thing about the building’s historic importance. But the most tragic thing, to me, is that there are not more places in America where you can eat a decently good taco bowl and meanwhile feel a bit haunted by the ghosts of transcendentalist writers. Boston is unique in this respect. To walk the streets of Boston is to feel completely immersed in the great saga of the city. Fenway Park, the Boston Gardens (featured in McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings), Old North Church, the Omni Parker House – you can feel the magical weight of the years in these places. They are not museums; they are all still in use. You can still ride a swan boat in the Boston Gardens. You can still attend a Red Sox game at Fenway Park. You can still sleep at the Omni Parker House, and it is still, as Mark Twain remarked, “close to heaven… by hotel standards.”
Boston is remarkable because most places in America do not take many pains to preserve their history. Boston is the only city I have visited where the spirit of the past so completely saturates the present. In The Lord of the Rings, the Ent Treebeard explains that it would take many years to say his true name, because the true name of anything is the whole story of its life. To stay in historic Boston for any amount of time is to learn a bit of its true name; to become aware that you are a part of a beautiful ongoing story. Like the Hobbits listening to the Ents, we are filled with awe. We suddenly sense the weight of years, the dizzying feeling of looking out and up at something unfathomably larger than we are, something that existed many years before we did and will go on existing just the same many years after we are gone. We are not used to this feeling. The greater part of western culture has given up on preserving the memory of its true name. We have a sort of amnesia.
I have a particular frustration with the maxim that “those who do not study the past are doomed to repeat it.” It is not only overused, it gets at less than half of the truth. The real doom of those who fail to study the past is that they are doomed not to repeat it. They must try to understand human nature without the advice of Plato and of Paul. They must try to find beauty on their own without the guidance of Bach and Lewis. They must even attempt to interpret the Bible for themselves instead of enlisting the ready help of Augustine and Luther. The fact that the best answer that most people in our culture can give when asked, “Why study history?” is “In order to avoid repeating it” reveals that there is something very wrong with the way we relate to the past. We are not merely pragmatic, we are pessimistic. We would strip the color and light away from the wild old stories and turn them into dull moralistic fables. Very few people would argue that the primary purpose of studying literature is to prevent us from replicating the mistakes of the characters (or if they do, then they are rather boring and unimaginative people). The point of reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is not primarily to prevent us from acting like Edmund. (Indeed, it is a bit too late for that. We have already eaten the Turkish delight.) We read literature to gain empathy, to gain wisdom, to gain a glimpse of something so intimate and familiar that we have always known it in a light that makes it appear completely wonderful and strange. The primary purpose of literature, in short, is to make us think, and to think in a way that engages our whole spirit. History, if we will only let it, will do this as well.
But let us address a test case. World War Two would seem an obvious example of a past event we must study in order to avoid repeating it. Few ideas seem to loom larger in the nightmares of our nation than the rise of an American Hitler. Now, if the only reason we study history is to avoid repeating it, then we might be able to identify a second Hitler. But if we want to prevent a second Hitler, we must make our study of history much richer than that. We can never hope to fight a second Hitler unless we can also somehow find a second Churchill. We can never hope to bravely counter the rise of another Nazism unless we can also raise another great generation of people like Corrie and Betsie Ten Boom. Thus, the only way we can ever hope to truly avoid the mistakes of the past is to make our study of history about much more than merely avoiding the mistakes of the past. We must study history in order to remember the true names of things. Hitler was only defeated by people with deep roots. When Churchill stood against all the darkness that loomed over his ancient island, he stood in the deep boot prints left by Boudicca and Alfred the Great. He gathered courage from the ancient tales of Arthur and his Knights. When he urged his people to fight on the beaches, to fight on the landing-grounds, to fight on the fields and in the streets, to fight in the hills, he used words that had been a part of the English language since the days of the proud old Anglo-Saxon warriors. I am not merely guessing here that Churchill valued the study of history. During the same years that he stood against Hitler, he worked on and off to write a multivolume work (which he completed and published some years later) titled A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Churchill defended England well because he knew she had a story worth preserving and nurturing. He understood that a culture can only protect its future by remaining deeply rooted in its past.
One caution: I am not saying that every historic tradition is worth preserving. Our loyalty to historical traditions should never outweigh our commitment to goodness and truth. The saints of the early church knew this when they put a stop to the ancient pagan practice of the exposure of infants. Martin Luther realized this as he came to understand the extent to which Roman tradition had strayed from Scripture. William Wilberforce knew this when he fought to end the slave trade that scarred the face of the Atlantic. The goal of the great reformers of the past was always to prune the tree of culture that it might grow stronger. In this sense, people living in the year 2025 do have an advantage over people who lived in the year 1025. We have an additional 1000 years of wise guidance to look to. But we seem to have gotten rather muddled up on that point. We now apparently assume that we have progressed past the need to listen to the ideas of the people who made the progress possible. A vast and beautiful network of knowledge – the great conversation – lies forgotten, while we run to ask AI chatbots for advice. The tree of our culture is withering, but very few people have thought of tending the roots.
I am certainly not saying that the present is so irredeemable that we ought to live in the past. We should not retreat to a library of dusty old books and defensively snarl at anything produced after the turn of the millennium. Let me return to Boston and the Old Corner Bookstore. Boston is a city saturated in history – but the people there do not “live in the past.” Rather, Boston is a place where the past flows into the present. It is a town where you can casually buy a burrito in a building that is on the national register of historic places. The lesson of Boston is that history is most beautiful when we notice how it connects with the present—that everything we see has a story; a true name. The only reason why I am able to write this article and you are able to read it is because many years ago, a forgetful man in ancient Mesopotamia wanted to a way record how many sheep he had and which belonged to him as opposed to his neighbor, so he invented written language. You are reading this article in English because once upon a time, a monk wrote down the old story of a hero called Beowulf who fought monsters and dragons – and the monk did not write in the scholarly language of Latin, but in his own tongue. This article is laid down in easy-to-read type because one day, a man named Gutenberg discovered a way to carve letters onto tiny individual blocks, which started a revolution in the availability of books and in the literacy level of the common man. Our lives are infused with ancient stories that grant depth, meaning, and context to everything we do. How could we ever forget?