The Beautiful Futility

[29pixie]

“The source of this passion isn’t simply a conviction that historians can change the world, it’s because I still believe in historical truth. Or rather, I believe in training the imagination at overcoming the sheer incomprehensibility of the past and, by an effort at once intellectual and aesthetic, move closer to a more exacting vision of an expired reality. I aspire to the truth, knowing that I’ll never achieve it, knowing that it is (as it must be) just out of my reach. [...] History is more art than science, striving for precision of the imagination.”
- Mark Gregory Pegg, preface A Most Holy War