Leon Bloy
History Is Like a Dream.]
As history unfurls, it becomes at once God’s secret, and even what is most authentic to the thinker’s mind is nothing more than a probable opinion. However documented a historian may be, he knows well that he does not see the fact confronting him which he has so painfully fished up, like a piece of flotsam from the depths of darkness. Its essential, divine form necessarily escapes him. We have sure, indisputable proof of a great number of historic events. in clearly determined periods; but these proofs, basically, have no other consistency than the absolute necessity of these events and these periods. This is what was necessary, and not something else. Here is the only criterion. Jeanne d’Arc might have been freed or ransomed by the king—her death was not a necessary consequence of her captivity, it has been said. True enough, but that is not what happened, because these vast injustices were indispensable to the working out of an enormously mysterious plan which we cannot understand.
[Tears.]
There is nothing else. Everything is vain except tears. History is like a
dream since it is built upon time, which is an illusion often painful, always uncapturable, an illusion impossible to make precise. Each of the infinitesimal
particles the sum of which we call duration hurtles toward the gulf of the past
with lightning speed, and history is nothing other than this swarm of lightning
flashes recorded upon the pupils of tortoises.
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We die the same death over and over when history becomes amnesia.
Remembrance of lives past and the lay of the lived remembered land is a sacred obligation. In a time of no sacred heart, amnesia grants amnesty from sin but not death. Salvation frees from the impersonal death as a cell, a cog in the machine of the social.