A Change of Direction

It must seem that I am departing a long way from the original emphasis of this blog in looking at military history, and particularly at battles. Of course it is, but that is my prerogative. The truth is that I love military history and have previously written about how battles were narrated and depicted, and to some extent about what that could tell us about the mental processes of those who wrote or drew or painted them. In point of fact, it is the mental processes that hold my attention, even if the drums and trumpets, the colorful uniforms, the complexity of the flow of events distracts me now and again.

But there is something else I want to point out, something that while it does simply represent my point of view, is, to me, a very important point. Any kind of history, any specialty, whether by subject, nation, region, or time period is just a piece of universal history. Universal history has gone out of fashion in the past century, but properly understood as a holistic picture of the world, one that has no proper bounds other than the nature of humanity; it must be the ending point of all historical endeavors. Maybe that sounds romantic or simply crazy to you. This is really my starting point, whether I am writing about the battle of Mobile Bay, the cognitive effects of clocks, the workings of Machiavelli's imagination (I inevitably end up coming back to Machiavelli like a lodestone), Tolkein's hatred of machinery, the significance of soldiers crying in a folk song, or the Red Baron's relationship to his airplanes. I was mistaken in trying to make this a blog about one aspect of history, for neither history nor my mind works that way. In the end, what matters is what these subjects can tell us about the spirit of a time, the nature of humanity, and our relationship with the world.

As always, I am feeling my way toward something that I may never reach. I suppose that could be taken as history as a form of mysticism, which, is, perhaps, not far from how I really view history. Sometimes I may sound pompous, even to my self. Oftentimes I may make statements that are maddeningly vague and which I cannot completely prove (and may later repudiate).

Everything in history is a clue to who we are and may become.