. . . "Reality is not only experience, it is immediate experience," R. G. Collingwood pointed out. "But thought divides, distinguishes, mediates; therefore just so far as we think about reality, we can deform it by destroying its immediacy, and thus thought can never grasp reality." Or, to put it another way, thought can grasp reality only in the same way that artists grasp images, states grasp landscapes, and historians grasp history: by destroying its immediacy, by dividing it, distinguishing it, mediating it, in short representing it. To reconstruct the real past is to construct an accessible but deformed past: it is to oppress the past, to constrain its spontaneity, to deny its liberty.

That's the dark side, but fortunately it's not the only side. For the historian who oppresses the past is also at the same time liberating the past, in much the same way that states, however much they may impose themselves on landscapes, still make it possible for most of us to live comfortably within them most of the time. Only the most extreme anarchist would want to eliminate the state and its infrastructure altogether. It's much the same with the writing of history. If it promised no benefits at all, then why would those who make history be as interested as they are in what those who compose it . . . are going to say about them?

From the earliest orally transmitted epics through the most recent presidential library fund-raising campaign, there's always been the belief on the part of those who do great deeds that their reputations should somehow survive them. The process has always required a commentator, whether it's a blind poet reciting verses around an ancient Greek campfire or the most contemporary, well-connected, and well-compensated biographer. Whoever they are, they preserve the past by making it legible and hence retrievable. And hope springs eternal among the makers of history that these recorders of history will treat them favorable. Even Hitler, in his bunker, was certain that history would vindicate him.

He was right about that in at least one sense, which is that historians do liberate their subjects from the prospect of being forgotten. Most of us understand that the physical remains we'll leave behind will be unimpressive: a few bones or a pile of ashes, for example . . . We hope for more dignified forms of commemoration: a tombstone, a memorial plaque, a named building or professorship if we can afford it . . . Historians perform that commemorative function for the great but dead: for however much we may imprison them within a particular representation, we do at least free them from oblivion.

To the extent that we place our subjects in context, we also rescue the world that surrounds them. As I tried to point out in an earlier chapter, historians surpass even science-fiction writers in their ability, through the manipulation of time, space, and scale, to recover lost worlds. We portray societies that may--like the Romans--or may not--like so many peasant cultures--have left their own monuments behind. We liberate the ones that have from their self-proclaimed grandiosity: we try not to confuse how they wanted to be seen with who they actually were. And we try to free those who left no monuments from the resulting silences, whether imposed upon them by others, or by themselves. Either way . . . we breathe life into whatever remains from another time, and we thereby assure it a kind of permanence.

It follows that we should also free the people and the societies we write about from tyrannies of judgment imported from other times and places. If it's hard for a man to cross a mountain because he thinks there might be devils lurking there, Collingwood once wrote, then "it is folly for the historian, preaching at him across a gulf of centuries, to say 'This is sheer superstition. There are no devils at all. Face the facts.'" Historians must not confuse the passage of time with the accumulation of intelligence by assuming that we're smarter now than they were then. We may have more information or better technology or easier methods of communication, but this doesn't necessarily mean that we're any more skillful at playing the cards we've been dealt. Good historians take the past on its own terms first, and only then impose their own. They guard against what Stephen Jay Gould has called the greatest of all historical errors: "arrogantly judging our forbears in the light of modern knowledge perforce unavailable to them."

This, in turn, means freeing not just the great but also the obscure in history from determinism: from the conviction that things could only have happened in the way that they did. Gould, who understood history better than most historians, is empathic on this point: "the essence of history . . . is contingency," he insists, "and contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determination by randomness." History is determined only as it happens. Nothing, apart from the passage of time itself, is inevitable. There are always choices, however unpromising these may have seemed at the time. Our responsibility as historians is as much to show that there were paths not taken as it is to explain the ones that were, and that too I think is an act of liberation.

Finally, when historians contest interpretations of the past among themselves, they're liberating it in yet another sense: from the possibility that there can only be a single valid explanation of what happened. . . . [B]y debating alternative perspectives on the past, we're allowing it breathing room. We're showing that the meaning of history isn't fixed when the making of history--and even the writing of history--is finished. That's liberation as well.

I can conceive of another kind of ghost, therefore, that could haunt historians as well as everyone else if these liberations of the past aren't performed: it's our own haunted spirits, locked up within a prison that's a future in which no one respects or perhaps even remembers us. That would be at least as painful as an incarceration as the one living historians impose upon ghosts from the past; and it's why we should allow that such ghosts, fearing the alternative of oblivion, might welcome being locked up in a prison of representation.

--John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History, pp. 138-141