Near the end of Alizah Holstein’s captivating memoir, My Roman History, documenting her journey from Portland to Rome, and subsequently her journey into academia and ultimately out the other side, she poses an exercise. One that anyone can try.
Think back to a critical juncture in your life
Think about the narrative you have built up around it in your mind
Go through your documented memories that have accumulated between now and then (letters, emails, photos, posts, journals, ect)
Ask yourself, does your story hold
This exercise is meant to bridge your history with the fabric of your present life. Holstein’s book is essentially doing this by paralleling her year of researching history in Rome for her dissertation, with her search for self. As she writes,
Ultimately, the job of the historian is to help us, collectively, to hold on to time. To sew its fragments together into something that makes sense, like a quilt we cover ourselves with in the dark. Look at this quilt, we say. As long as we have it, we know who we are. We know where we come from, and because of it, we think we have the tiniest inkling of where we are going. In the morning we might toss it off, leap bravely forward into the unknown, but when night comes, we clutch it to our necks and console ourselves with the sounds of our own stories: “because… and because…. and because.” The narrative changes over time, we sew it, and resew it, and sometimes we fight about what should go where., which patches have been neglected, which others are monopolizing the center. But most of the time, we take it for granted, and night after night it keeps us warm and dry. (p323)
In this sense, it is both true that we do history by reading the history the historians have unearthed and preserved, and we are likewise historians, both of our lives and that which has captivated our attention and our passions in this world.
Life becomes the constant push and pull between where we percieve ourselves to be in the present, and the past that pushes in, reframing our vantage point. This is the dance we undertake.
Mere pages later she surmises about an analogy that can help frame this in proper perspective. In encountering a medieval tower, she imagines having spent ones whole life inside its walls, never having ventured outside. Your perception would be that this wall is what is true and real about the world you occupy. It might take different shapes and have different things mounted on them. But you would never understand “why”. It would simply be what it is.
Until you stepped outside. It is only by stepping outside of those walls that you gain that necessary vantage point. As she writes,
Had you not stepped out onto the street, you would never have known that what gave your living room wall its distinctive shape, what made it yours, was a vast history pressing in on it from outside. You would not perceive the extent to which the present, with which you consider yourself so intimate, has been sculpted by the past (p 330)
All things exist in relationship.
So it is with our lives. So it is with what gives our lives shape. The same can be said for the world at large. To understand how it is that the world has come to be, we step out of the walls of our present framework and begin to see from the outside. From a religious persepctive, this would reach even broader- to see from the vantage point of God. God pressing in. God relating to the present by way of the journies that shape the world, and likewise ourselves.
I sometimes wonder whether we know more than we think we do about our lives’ trajectories, whether the lines on which we travel come endowed with a few fixed points. Most of the time, they are invisible to us, or we are too distracted to notice them, but they trace our movements under the earth, or over it, or pierce us right through our hearts (p326)
To be present is to be aware of where we are beyond the present of where we are.
So it is with our lives.
So it is with the world
But there is more than awareness at play. We also must interpret. As Holstein writes,
It is true that the past is always there, behind us, about to catch up and overtake us, and- if we are not careful- swallow us whole. Such a fact is not to be discounted. But the past can swallow us only if, succumbing to our instinct to flee, we neglect to turn around. If we do not look it honestly in the face, and assess the people we once were, neither to valorize and amplify nor to castigate and erase, but to confront, to the best of our ability, how we have arrived where we are. We must grasp the shape of the past that defines by its very contours the structure of the room, otherwise known as the present, that we inhabit. (p332)
It is only in this process that we can come to the truth of who we are, what this world is. So much of Holstein’s book is wrestling with that gap that exists between the past the present, ancient Rome and the modern world. It’s not a coincidence that the modern narrative prides itself on its ability to deatach itself from the past. It is about progress. About the future. And yet her journey from Portland to Rome is marked by such assumptions continually being overturned. It pulls her out of the future and into the present by way of the past. Citing Nietzsche, she writes,
When the historical sense reigns without restraint, it uproots the future because it destroys illusions and robs the things that exist of the asmosphere in which alone they can live (p332)
In short, it changes our vantage point and reframes our perspective, challengiing the narratives that we beleive bring us to truth and contain the truth. It sets the whole of reality in conversation. The whole of oursevles in conversation. And as such opens us up to the necessary inbreaking of revelation.
As I often reflect upon, part of the fabric of the modern world is its perceived allegiance to a singular way of knowing- science. And this singular way of knowing is attached to a firmly entrenched myth of progress. This is the modern, western narrative, one built on strong cuts with the past, that past that it perceives holds it back. As long as progress is in motion, history is unecessary, even rendered non-existent. It is paved over quicker than it can be formed as memory, leaving nothing to be recovered.
One of the outcomes of this is a loss of perspective. A loss of truth. The turth about ourselves. The truth about this world, about Reality.
As she experienced, the loss of herself.
In reducing knoweldge to a singular way of knowing we essentially come to see this world as a set of walls. Walls in which a narrowly defined naturalism defines us according to its function and utility. It keeps us from stepping outside, of being able to gain that perspective in a way that can challenge our tightly guarded narratives of the present.
This is what getting on that plane and going is able to disrupt.
The Stories of my Life 