Why I Love History

Edinburgh

I love history. To me, it is a story...a great story to be relived and taught from.

Not so much the dry, dustier than sawdust recitation of history in which endless names and dates and policies and legislation are vomited together in something that is supposed to compel the human mind to term it as "interesting." No, that is not my kind of history. And no, dear friends of mine who enjoy this, I don’t like sitting for hours debating about who killed Kennedy, how many bullets were used, etc. That, to me, seems pointless. I love the history that tells the story of man; his heroic deeds, the colorful ancient world in which he lived, his honor, his passion, his selfless acts of bravery.

I love the Victorian period. I love to hear about the glory of Rome, the age of the Greeks, the Vikings, the crusaders, the Knights, the wars of the world…. Riding horses upon cobblestone, Keats sitting in his quiet garden, lost in composing poetry his race against time and his failing lungs, phonographs, beautiful love letters, the courage of men who fought in war, Edmund Burke’s words, “All that's necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.”

I love it all so much.

I also love holding old books. No not books from like 1956...I mean old...old books. I have a book that is from 1886. Can you believe that! Sometimes, now don’t think me weird, I go to the library just to browse through old books. I open the featherlike pages, run my fingers across the ancient typography and begin to dream about the world in which this book was born. Oh, what deep and learned minds must have gazed upon the pages.... eyes that never had been tainted by this noisy, materialistic, Twilight driven society. No... the minds that read these words had read Shakespeare, Cowper, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Jane Austen, Aristotle... oh what a world... I wish I had been born in such a time! This is why I love history... I suppose it is tangled within my love of writing and literature. What a pretty world of wonder!