In Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, the fortuneteller unfurls
her skirts, hoists her bodice, strolls downstage and heckles the
audience. Oh, she can tell the future, all right. “Nothing easier,” she
says. “But who can tell your past, eh? Nobody! You lie awake nights
trying to know your past. What did it mean? What was it trying to say
to you? Think! Think!” Think, indeed. The only action one can take toward the past is to think
about it. This may be the one way the past is ever changed, by the
mind’s reviewing all the historical laundry that blizzarded down in an
undifferentiated heap when the past was taking place, then sorting it
out in chaste, clean piles. It never makes sense, even when considering
years as recent as the past 60. What really happened? History relies on
memory, and memory on will. An 11th century Chinese emperor possessed a
newly invented clock, which his people knew about, though no one owned
a clock but he. When the emperor died, the imperial clock was allowed
to fall apart, and everyone forgot that such a device had ever existed.
Five hundred years later, Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit priest, arrived in
Asia bearing a new Italian invention called a clock. The Chinese
marveled at the thing. What clocks have we forgotten in the past 60 years? Which among the
clocks preserved ought in fact to be forgotten, set aside on a distant
shelf like a porcelain dog? This midsection chunk of the 20th century presents the problem amply, with its abundance
of wars, villains, scientific miracles, remappings of the earth. Six
decades of speeches, treaties, books, bombs, pills, screams and
rockets. What will have mattered in the long run? And what does
“mattered” mean? There is the fact, and the idea, and the person who
has the idea. The fact was that Rosa Parks got tired of being told to give up her seat
on the bus to any white man who happened along, so she got off that
bus, to be followed by almost all the blacks in Montgomery, Ala. Thus
began modern American civil rights legislation. Or did it start instead
with Martin Luther King, who saw where boycotting segregated buses
might lead, or with Gandhi, whose example taught King the tactics of
civil disobedience? Or rather were the civil rights laws of the 1960s
passed because of a general and amorphous sense of national shame to
which Parks and King served merely as goads? U.S. civil rights
legislation mattered very much to Americans; will it have mattered to
the rest of the world? Will America have mattered to the rest of the
world after a hundred more 60-year periods have vanished, and will we
stand in regard to the curious nations of the future as the Etruscans
or the Titans do to us?
