Brave Companions: Portraits in History

How can we know who we are and where we are going if we don't know anything about where we have come from and what we have been through, the courage shown, the costs paid, to be where we are?

The evil of technology was not technology itself, Lindbergh came to see after the war, not in airplanes or the myriad contrivances of modern technical igenuity, but in the extent to which they can distance us from our better moral nature, or sense of personal accountability.

I feel so sorry for anyone who misses the experience of history, the horizons of history. We think little of those who, given the chance to travel, go nowhere. We deprecate provincialism. But it is possible to be as provincial in time as it is in space. Because you were born into this particular era doesn't mean it has to be the limit of your experience. Move about in time, go places. Why restrict your circle of acquaintances to only those who occupy the same stage we call the present?

The past after all is only another name for someone else's present.

Have the courage to say I do not know.

And it’s so easy because you become so self-conscious and so intellectual and so analytical about it in the long run that you lose that wonderful sort of ego that you have that says, ‘Oh, goddamn it, I don’t care; I love it anyway; I’m going to do it!

Harry Truman used to talk of Potomac Fever, an endemic disorder the symptoms of which were a swelled head and a general decline of common sense.

Mainly, writing means a good deal of hard thinking … yet sometimes the very struggle of getting the words down on paper does result in unexpected discoveries or clarifications.

…the little known events of a given time, and people who are not in the headlines can be what matters most in the long run – and the long run is the measure of history.

In writing history, to catch the feeling and well as the truth of other times, it is of utmost importance … to convey the sense that things need not have happened as they did…the past, after all, is only another name for someone else’s present

The problem, as Thornton Wilder said, lies in the effort to employ the past tense in such a way that it does not rob those events of their character of having occurred in freedom.

It is a shame that history is ever made dry and tedious, or offered as a chronicle almost exclusively of politics, war, and social issues when of course it is the full sweep of human experience. Politics, war, and social issues to be sure, but also music, science, religion, medicine, the way things are made, new ideas…history is a spacious realm, there should be no walls.

sometimes the very struggle of getting the words down on paper does result in unexpected discoveries or clarifications.

He worked fast, totally absorbed and whistling some tune over and over until it drove anyone else present to distraction.

the Paris flight, which was rushed into print

He believed, this brilliant, determined young man being eaten alive by mosquitoes, that there is a harmony of nature, that man is a part of that harmony, and that if he himself could observe things closely enough, collect enough—if he knew enough—then the forces that determine that harmony would become apparent.

In a letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes she wrote: “I make no mental effort of any sort; my brain is tired out. It was a woman’s brain and not a man’s, and finally from sheer fatigue and exhaustion in the march and strife of life it gave out before the end was reached. And now I rest me, like a moored boat, rising and falling on the water, with loosened cordage and flapping sail.

Just imagine this,” he says. “If those three men who went to the moon had started to befoul their aircraft, if they had begun to tear it apart and fill it with all manner of filth, we would say they had gone mad. But here we are on this planet, this huge spaceship, befouling it, ripping it asunder, and nobody seems to say very much about that. Nobody seems to care.