Douglas Mercer
November 3 2024
Great artists ship—Steve Jobs
In the preface to her book the March Of Folly Barbara Tuchman related the story how when she was researching the book in a university library she would every day courteously say hello to a female scholar who was preparing a book on some topic. She said that the woman was every day always at the same desk, was always there before her and was always there when she left, and she was always surrounded by an array of books and her ever proliferating and copious notes. She said the woman was laser focused and indefatigable and never looked up from her work and would always be patiently transcribing some fact to paper, she was calm and quiet and was the very picture of patience which could seemingly never be exhausted. As of the time she published her book Tuchman said as far as she knew the woman had no publications to her name and for all she knew she was still sitting at that library desk accumulating more and ever more information. Tuchman said she admired the woman greatly, that she herself did not have that kind of iron fortitude or steeled discipline, and she was sure that on the subject at hand no one in the world knew more than that woman and no one likely ever would. But nonetheless the moral that Tuchman drew reluctantly from this encounter was that the historian’s craft was a chancy one; and that although the human past was extraordinary complex it was not infinitely so; and that although one had to much more than get the gist of the subject as one approached the weeds danger looms; and one is constrained to take one’s heart in one’s hand and cease one’s search. The ever alluring temptation was to think that somewhere in the always growing stack was another piece of information, another book, or another reference, or another arcane allusion, a piece of data that would cast a whole new light on the subject, and that to leave off meant that one might be exposed to a future researcher, more cunning or more diligent than oneself, who would discover it, and thus leave you in the historical shade as a dead letter, on the ash heap of history. Tuchman drew in a breath and counseled her readers to resist this temptation with great determination, to understand that at a certain point this putative new factoid was unlikely to exist, and to believe that one could master a subject and to consider that despite whatever new might emerge one had the relevant facts. This is the belief that there is a bottom to things, or at least a simulacrum thereof, and that nothing in this world is infinite; that as the old adage goes when the time comes you have to give up looking, and simply take your ticket and go. This belief is known in the literature by the term of art called the valley of decision. Because beneath the level of what mortals can discover is nothing but a long march of folly.
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Notes:
An old saying among historians is that there are no decisive moments in history.
The future is not like the past—old English idiom.
I have often felt overwhelmed as new material came my way, sent to me by friends and correspondents, and then links to one site and then another in an endless chain. But at some point research must stop and the writer must put pixels to the screen in order get his message across--Gary Lachman
