Runner Of The Mountain Tops - The Life Of Louis Agassiz The Life of Louis Agassiz

Rumor and Reflection BY BERNARD BERENSON 19 52 SIMON AND SCHUSTER New York DMITRI KESSELL TO NICKY Edel sei der Mensch Hilfreich und gut GOETHE, Das Gottliche Contents PREFACE page ix 1941 1942 page 59 - 1943 - page 105 1944 page 199 EPILOGUE page 441 INDEX page 447 Preface LET ME try to tell why I have chosen Rumor and Reflection for the title of my diary. The greater part of it was written while I was in hiding from the rage of the gangs who, in the enjoyment of Nazi approval and sup port, could throw of-the restraints of the more bourgeois elements of the Fascist regime, and return to the reckless violence with which it had started out. I read Italian and German dailies and listened to radio news from France and England, but direct con tacts with the living world were limited to my hosts and fellow guests, or to a changing number of acquaintances of my hosts who found it convenient to disappear for short periods from Fascist-Nazi eyes. After more than sixty years in which I have been reading intel lectualized, geometrized, dehumanized, or tendentious history I have come to question whether we get through it a more intelligi ble panorama of a given period in the past than by reading bards like Herodotus and Livy on Persian and Punic wars, or Carlyle and Michelet with their somewhat more trustworthy account of causes and consequences, of motive and realization in the French Revo lution. Even these do not give me the warm feeling of intimacy with the past that I get from diaries and letters. When I read Greville or the correspondence contained in the lives of public ix X PREFACE men, say of the Lord Clarendon of a hundred years ago, I feel the same sensation as being in it, of touchinghistory in the making, as when looking through a batch of morning papers. Jet of what do the papers consist Of rumors that may turn out to be events, of gossip about yesterday, of guesses about tomor row, of attempts to shape the past into a model for the future and to steer tomorrow as today but perhaps not when tomorrow has become today in the direction that we wish it to go. Nobody denies that this or that occurrence took place in the past say the change-over from an orderly world state like the pagan Roman Empire to the all but anarchical, monastic one of Western and Central Europe in our seventh and eighth centuries. Discussions as to how, why, whether for worse or for better that make up the bulk of history books are not in the nature of events but of what people think and tattle about them. For my part I see little difference, except in quality, between pompous, self-admir ing historians like Gibbon, and romancers writing about the same period like Felix Dahn or AmSdee Thierry. Or, coming nearer to our day, I wonder whether the majority of Frenchmen do not get a better acquaintance with their sixteenth and seventeenth cen turies reading Dumas when boys than they acquire later from Chartist historians, Dumas gossips in evocative, glowing fashion about the past and the others add up statistics and philosophize about them in a way that is just as much a mere interpretation. And all interpretations or conclusions, based as they are in the realms of history on data so inadequate, so questionable, can only be in the nature of what we happen to feel and think about them of gossip, in short. Indeed, William James used to say Come, let us gossip about the universe Six decades have passedand mar velous discoveries have been made, yet I question whether he would be less inclined to feel that it was all gossip. Maybe even the principal actors do not know from day to day just what is happening. Man, say a Hitler, proposes but a complex of forces beyond his control, beyond his ken even, disposes. He too can only guess. What matters is not events but what we think about them. Any PREFACE XI number are now occurring that in a few years may change the quality of living...