When you are a child having a happy, normal childhood, it is easy to imagine that the half-baked, seat-of-the-pants, fly-by-night schemes and solutions of grown-ups are simply how things are supposed to go in all cases. It can be hard to imagine them having gone differently. (For a life gone awry, see Emmett Rensin on the anti-psychiatry movement, page 23.)
Take, for example, the American revolution. One learns about the Boston Tea Party, Lexington and Concord, Paul Revere’s ride, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, winter at Valley Forge, and the victory at Yorktown; but it requires a certain maturity to begin to appreciate the precariousness visible in these events which applies to all things, and to see how very different life might have been. Counter-factual history is a popular genre of fantasy, but it tends only to consider decisive events (Peter Hitchens envisions what would have occurred had the Soviet Union not fallen, page 57). If you need to develop your ambition, begin seriously asking yourself, What if I didn’t? about everything.
This applies as much to things that stay the same as it does to things that change. The transmission of ancient texts seems in many cases like an accident, with those that have survived and those that perished forever separated only by a fire, flood, mold, or cataloging decision that seemed meaningless at the time. The great English antiquarian John Stow began recording his survey of London almost obsessively as he witnessed so much of its physical history being pulled down and destroyed in the Reformation; he was repeatedly put on trial for the possession and preservation of illegal texts. (For a consideration of illegal texts, see Dominic Green on Jonathan Swift, page 49.)
Such there-but-for-the-grace-of-God serendipities pervade the ordinary American’s family tree. How much American genealogy would be lost had not the 1850 census begun naming all members of a household and not just its head? (For a genealogy of the Church in Virginia, see Mary Kate Aylward, page 10.) The members of the Daughters of the American Revolution today benefit enormously from their Patriot ancestors’ habit when forcibly conscripting goods from ordinary citizens of leaving receipt and logging it in their central records.
There can be no other summing up but to reflect that God preserves permits things to fall away according to His will. Saint Augustine says, “We therefore see these things which Thou madest, because they are: but they are, because Thou seest them. And we see without, that they are, and within, that they are good, but Thou sawest them there, when made, where Thou sawest them, yet to be made.”
When you are a child having a happy, normal childhood, it is easy to imagine that the half-baked, seat-of-the-pants, fly-by-night schemes and solutions of grown-ups are simply how things are supposed to go in all cases. It can be hard to imagine them having gone differently. (For a life gone awry, see Emmett Rensin on the anti-psychiatry movement, page 23.)
Take, for example, the American revolution. One learns about the Boston Tea Party, Lexington and Concord, Paul Revere’s ride, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, winter at Valley Forge, and the victory at Yorktown; but it requires a certain maturity to begin to appreciate the precariousness visible in these events which applies to all things, and to see how very different life might have been. Counter-factual history is a popular genre of fantasy, but it tends only to consider decisive events (Peter Hitchens envisions what would have occurred had the Soviet Union not fallen, page 57). If you need to develop your ambition, begin seriously asking yourself, What if I didn’t? about everything.
This applies as much to things that stay the same as it does to things that change. The transmission of ancient texts seems in many cases like an accident, with those that have survived and those that perished forever separated only by a fire, flood, mold, or cataloging decision that seemed meaningless at the time. The great English antiquarian John Stow began recording his survey of London almost obsessively as he witnessed so much of its physical history being pulled down and destroyed in the Reformation; he was repeatedly put on trial for the possession and preservation of illegal texts. (For a consideration of illegal texts, see Dominic Green on Jonathan Swift, page 49.)
Such there-but-for-the-grace-of-God serendipities pervade the ordinary American’s family tree. How much American genealogy would be lost had not the 1850 census begun naming all members of a household and not just its head? (For a genealogy of the Church in Virginia, see Mary Kate Aylward, page 10.) The members of the Daughters of the American Revolution today benefit enormously from their Patriot ancestors’ habit when forcibly conscripting goods from ordinary citizens of leaving receipt and logging it in their central records.
There can be no other summing up but to reflect that God preserves permits things to fall away according to His will. Saint Augustine says, “We therefore see these things which Thou madest, because they are: but they are, because Thou seest them. And we see without, that they are, and within, that they are good, but Thou sawest them there, when made, where Thou sawest them, yet to be made.”
