One of the numerous habits that family and friends castigate me over is my habit of re-reading books. That happens to be the one I will not give on. As far as I'm concerned, he who never re-reads a book gains nothing from it, and a book that will not bear re-reading was probably not worth the first effort. Why do we keep them in shelves in our houses, if not to use them when we would, however many times?
So yes, I'm now on the fourth or fifth re-reading of Shelby Foote's three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, and have been since the summer began. The thrill of the story does not abate. The pagentry of ambition was never so rythmically rendered, as Mclernand and Meade and Rosecrans and Hooker and Buell and Burnside and McClellan and Pope and Fremont rose and fell, each one a bit better suited to the war they were fighting than their predecessor, yet not good enough, until leadership fell into the hands of Grant and Sherman, who, like Ulysses, understood the nature of the conflict. And that's just the Northern side. Watching to the gamecocks of the South preen, ruffle, and charge is likewise a mystifying experience. Proud as Roland they sound to us, and proud as Roland they stood, against the waves of history, and now they sound truly ancient, truly dead.
And yes, I know my politico-socio-encomic arithmetic 'bout the U.S. of the 1860's as well as the cynics would like, and I am confident in the truth of the assertion that no man, however grand, arises from nowhere. Yet cannot we take our Marx with a grain of Virgil? If Foote's epic teaches us nothing, it teaches us that different men drive the same chariot at different speeds to different ends. Would it kill us to again make our history larger than broken pottery, to find in it something other than a hair-shirt for the modern world, to make it human rather than a vast cosmic cog?
Because I prophesy thusly: until we learn to love our history again, we shall never learn it, much less learn from it.
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