The past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present. If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.
Interpretation
Understanding the past can be challenging due to its inherent uncertainty.
This quote reflects the idea that our comprehension of past events is clouded not only by time but also by the limitations of our perception during those moments. It emphasizes that even when moments are unfolding, our grasp of their significance or full context can be obscured, leaving us with only fragmented memories or emotional impressions.
In practice
In a discussion about historical accuracy, one might quote this to highlight the ambiguity of past narratives.
The future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on.
The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.
Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.
Love, like light, is a thing that is enacted better than defined: we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper.
Those doves below, the ones utterly cared for, never endangered ones, cannot know tenderness.
A bad review is even less important than whether it is raining in Patagonia.
We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence.
A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.
Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?
Dear friends, let us not forget the flesh of Christ which is in the flesh of refugees: their flesh is the flesh of Christ. It is also your task to direct all the institutions working in the area of forced migration to new forms of co-responsibility. This phenomenon is unfortunately constantly spreading. Hence your task is increasingly demanding in order to promote tangible responses of closeness, journeying with people, taking into account the different local backgrounds.
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