What We Can Know - 11

L et me repeat. Most of our history and literature students care nothing for the past and are indifferent to the accretions of poetry and fiction that are our beautiful inheritance. They sign up to the humanities because they lack mathematical or technical talent. We are the poor cousins and we don’t get the smartest bunch. Our offices are dilapidated. Many of them leak. Our salaries are fixed at one half of the rate for our scientific colleagues. We console ourselves that we are more in touch than they are with the bottomless ignorance of the generational zeitgeist. But as our dean Torsten Schmidt points out in his welcoming speech to the new intake of students every year, they have before them on their computers a mountain range of unexplored material. Every song, lie, casual thought, opera performance, death threat, punk-band riot – all of it, more than 120 years of the collective human mind rescued for our perusal. The view, he will say, keeping with the alpine imagery, extends from the microbiology of the flora to the peaks on the curved horizon.

At this early stage, the students are not convinced. They cannot believe that pre-Inundation people of a mere century ago were at all like themselves. Those ancients were ignorant, squalid and destructive louts. As one of the brighter students pointed out, surely they could have done something other than grow their economies and wage wars. Behind this, though never stated, is the notion that they deserved the mega-deaths they brought upon themselves. Most of our kids are well into their second year before they begin to accept that the men, women and children of the medium to distant past were once as real to themselves as we are. Until then, the students make little distinction between the tenth and twentieth centuries, between the Thirty Years War and the Third Sino-American War. Or between Mark Antony and Mark Twain. Young people today dismiss the past for not having yet devised the pharmaceuticals they enjoy, though they could never tell you how they work. As was noted long ago, we are all innocent children in the tall forest of our clever inventions.

What brings our students round to the beginning of a mature understanding of history and an appreciation of what the past has imagined is – simply – detail . The everyday life of, say, a mid-twenty-first-century junior doctor as told by her digital traffic, recording her week: dropping her young children at nursery, dealing with intractable illnesses, difficult patients, useless or gifted colleagues, low pay, constant pressure, keeping watch on troubling political developments, meeting friends, loving or ceasing to love her husband, paying bills, streaming new music, planning a holiday, worrying about a pain, ordering the shopping – and so on, a picture made up of countless points of different colours, like a landscape by Seurat, whose work we display and explain, can arouse even the dullest of our students into an acceptance of shared humanity across an immensity of time. If we replace the doctor with an eighteen-year-old and her cascade of confusion, frets and joys, we might have even greater success. But not always. Some students do not like to see their own reflections. We’ve built up half a dozen case studies over the years. Four of our subjects were obscure, two were globally famous in the forgotten youth culture of the late twentieth century. What they have in common are the tracks they left behind of the minutiae of daily existence. Before the code was written for the Web, and then for email and social media, not even Samuel Pepys came close to the blizzard of humdrum diurnal doings to be found in our six cases.

Once these details have worked their magic on the students and they sense a past inhabited by real individuals, they can begin to take an interest in what those people imagined onto the page or screen. Then, in due course, how some were better at imagining than others. And so, literary studies, growing out of a historical sense, and deploying the old-fashioned tools of comparison and analysis, can begin. And then – the hoped-for final stage, an appreciation of the imagination leaping clear of time-bound circumstance into the bright air of timeless aesthetic pleasure and human relevance. That, at least, is the theory. Sometimes it works.

Teaching the 90–30 seminars to our groups of postgraduates has been our greatest reward. Our forty years were the best and worst of times, to misquote Charles Dickens. ‘The spring of hope … the winter of despair.’ I prefer teaching the post-2015 period, when social media were beginning to be drawn into the currency of private lives, when waves of fantastical or malevolent or silly rumours began to shape the nature not only of politics but of human understanding. Fascinating! It was as if credulous medieval masses had burst through into modernity, rushing into the wrong theatre and onto the wrong stage set. In the stampede, grisly government secrets were spilled, childhoods despoiled, honourable reputations trampled down and loud-mouthed fools elevated. Meanwhile, good poetry was written, and in 2016 the novelist Mabel Fisk was born to chaotic neglectful parents in the English town of Stockport. At last civilisation had delivered an imaginative genius to equal Shakespeare’s. In 2023 first intimations of a cure for Alzheimer’s and related diseases were published by a Cambridge research team. Far too late for Percy Greene.