Reading.

Here is a brief extract from Lowenthal's The Past is a Foreign Country. It is part of a chapter trying to explain why the past is of use to us. Other chapters deal with the ways we try to access the past, and how we interpret it in the present. Very few students could read it in its entirety, but it is a mine of information for a heritage interpreter. You ought to read some of it (we have it in the library).

"The surviving past's most essential and pervasive benefit is to render the present familiar . Its traces on the ground and in our minds let us make sense of the present. Without habit and the memory of past experience, no sight or sound would mean anything; we can perceive only what we are accustomed to. Environmental features and patterns are recognized as features and patterns because we share a history with them. Every object, every grouping, every view is intelligible largely because previous encounters and tales heard, books read, pictures seen, have made them already familiar. Only habituation enables us to understand what lies around us. ....

The remembered past requires us all to behave, however unwittingly, as historians. Carl Becker's Mr .Everyman, when he awakens in the morning, reaches out into the country of the past and of distant places, ...pulls together. ..things said and done in his yesterdays, and coordinates them with his present perceptions. ..Without this historical knowledge, this memory of things said and done, his to-day would be aimless and his tomorrow without significance.

....

Not only is the past recalled in what we see; it is incarnate in what we create. Familiarity makes surroundings comfortable; hence we keep memorabilia and add new things whose decor evokes the old. Electric fireplaces simulate Victorian coal or Tudor burning-log effects; plastic cabinets and vinyl-tile floors recall the 'natural' past with a wood-grain look; leaded lights painted on windows feign ancient cosiness; electric fixtures resemble candles or paraffin lamps. Such embrace of the past is often unconscious. The designer may intend the anachronism of his concrete hearth logs or candle-drip light bulbs, but for most users they have ceased to evoke memories of the earlier prototypes that in fact lend them their familiar charm. Obsolete structures and artifacts similarly live on unobserved in contemporary language: newsmen make up pages 'on the stone' though that technology has long been obsolete; ....

Surrogate and second-hand experiences further infuse present perception: we conceive of things not only as seen but also as heard and read about before. My image of London is a composite of personal experience, contemporary media, and historical images stemming from Hogarth and Turner, Pepys and Dickens. Despite the novelty and strangeness of the English scene, the American Charles Eliot Norton felt on arrival that an 'old world look' gave 'those old world things. ..a deeper familiarity than the very things that have lain before our eyes since we were born'. Past impressions often so trenchantly embody the character of places they override our own immediate impressions. Constable's Suffolk has 'become the countryside. ..of all of us, even if we have a quite different landscape outside our windows' , notes Nicholas Penny. 'We feel that we have grown up not only with jigsaws and illustrated biscuit tins showing that little boy on a pony beside the river with the mill in the distance, but with the reality represented. ..England was like that, we feel sure [and] we convince ourselves that his country is. ..still surviving today.' Hardy's Wessex, Wordsworth's Lake District, Samuel Palmer's North Downs, all 'ghost features kept in existence by nostalgia', dominate our images of these landscapes, showing the power 'of a vanished past over a palpable present'; Monet so 'shaped our notion of the lie de France ...that we have trouble believing that his was not the complete, definitive and everlasting account of. ..Argenteuil, in particular'. It is not just habituation that makes such impressions so enduring. Hindsight enables us to comprehend past scenes as we cannot those of the incoherent present; yesterday's more comprehensible remembered images dominate and obscure today's kaleidoscopic perceptions."