Waterland

Children, be curious. Nothing is worse (I know it) than when curiosity stops. Nothing is more repressive than the repression of curiosity. Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It's part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit. People die when curiosity goes. People have to find out, people have to know.

What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.

Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man - let me offer you a definition - is the storytelling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail-signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories. He has to keep on making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall - or when he's about to drown - he sees, passing rapidly before him, the story of his whole life.

That's the way it is: life includes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here.

Why is it that every so often history demands a bloodbath, a holocaust, an Armageddon? And why is it that every time the time before has taught us nothing?

Realism; fatalism; phlegm. To live in the Fens is to receive strong doses of reality. The great flat monotony of reality; the wide empty space of reality. Melancholia and self-murder are not unknown in the Fens. Heavy drinking, madness and sudden acts of violence are not uncommon. How do you surmount reality, children? How do you acquire, in a flat country, the tonic of elevated feelings?

What is a history teacher? He's someone who teaches mistakes.

What does education do, what does it have to offer, when deprived of its necessary partner, the future, and face instead with - no future at all?

There’s this thing called progress. But it doesn’t progress, it doesn’t go anywhere. Because as progress progresses the world can slip away. It’s progress if you can stop the world slipping away. My humble model for progress is the reclamation of land. Which is repeatedly, never-endingly retrieving what is lost. A dogged, vigilant business. A dull yet valuable business. A hard, inglorious business. But you shouldn’t go mistaking the reclamation of land for the building of empires.

There are no compasses for journeying in time.

And there's no saying what heady potions we won't concoct, what meanings, myths, manias we won't imbibe in order to convince ourselves that reality is not an empty vessel.

Why are the Fens flat? So God has a clear view...

But I have not brought history with me this evening (history is a thin garment, easily punctured by a knife blade called Now). I have brought my fear.

And what does this question Why imply? It implies (...) dissatisfaction, disquiet, a sense that all is not well. In a state of perfect contentment there would be no need or room for this irritant little word. History begins only at the point where things go wrong; history is born only with trouble, with perplexity, with regret. So that hard on the heels of the word Why comes the sly and wistful word If. If it had not been for … If only … Were it not … Those useless Ifs of history.

Ah, children, pity level-crossing keepers, pity lock-keepers – pity lighthouse-keepers – pity all the keepers of this world (pity even school teachers), caught between their conscience and the bleak horizon…

I taught you that there is never any end to that question, because, as I once defined it for you (yes, I confess a weakness for improvised definitions), history is that impossible thing: the attempt to give an account with incomplete knowledge, of actions themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge.

Reality's not strange, not unexpected.Reality doesn't reside in the hallucination of events. Reality is uneventfulness, vacancy, flatness. Reality is that nothing happens.

And so long as we have this itch for explanations, must we not always carry round with us this cumbersome but precious bag of clues called History? Another definition: Man, the animal which demands an explanation, the animal which asks Why.

On the top of Greenwich Hill

Thus Jack Parr spent a whole night under the stars - which, according to my father, hang in perpetual suspension because of our sins stupid with alcohol, waiting for iron-wheeled death which never came. Thus he sat-lay-snored-dreamed. Till he awoke, amidst the twittering of skylarks, to discover that he was not dead but alive and that by his calculation (for Flora Parr said nothing) two passenger trains and three goods had roared over him without leaving a single mark. And thus Jack Parr, who was a superstitious man and that very morning swore to forsake drink, came to believe that God, who sometimes brings about by way of punishment inexplicable cruelties and drowns a man's own son, also performs inexplicable wonders. Because, despite everything, despite emptiness, monotony, this Fenland, this palpable earth raised out of the flood by centuries of toil, is a magical, a miraculous land.

Nothing is more repressive than the repression of curiosity. Curiosity begets love. It weds us to the world. It’s part of our perverse, madcap love for this impossible planet we inhabit. People die when curiosity goes. People have to find out, people have to

Učil sem vas, da se z neutrudnim iskanjem pojasnil ne dokopljemo do pojasnila vseh pojasnil, temveč do spoznanja, da je naša zmožnost razlage omejena.

history is that impossible thing: the attempt to give an account, with incomplete knowledge, of actions themselves undertaken with incomplete knowledge. So that it teaches us no shortcuts to Salvation, no recipe for a New World, only the dogged and patient art of making do.

For what is water, which seeks to make all things level, which has no taste or colour of its own, but a liquid form of Nothing? And what are the Fens, which so imitate in their levelness the natural disposition of water, but a landscape which, of all landscapes, most approximates to Nothing?