Ah Youth!
A nostalgic rhapsody of imagery spoken out loud reveals both the passions of youthful innocence and the burnout suffered by those without the moxie to hold onto those principles. This imagery is certainly not universally applicable, but it definitely will stoke the fires of nostalgia of many readers of this particular tome:
“When we were young, we took everything so seriously. Everything we read. Every exhibition and concert and book. All those poems. We were serious people and believed in things. In ideas. So sincere. And the way we talked: ‘ethical aesthetics’ and ‘the moral passions of the culture’…We were so earnest and principled but so intense..."
Opening Imagery
The very first paragraph of the book is a commingling of metaphor, symbol, and imagery. The first-person narrator is in a contemplative mood as he ponders over how the type of career one chooses ultimately puts a stamp on the type of legacy they the live and leave behind:
“…biology and chemistry professors pass away and decompose into biology and chemistry, they mineralize into geology, they disperse into their science, just as surely as mathematicians become statistics. The same process holds true for us historians—in my experience, we’re the only ones in the humanities for whom this holds true—the only ones who become what we study; we age, we yellow, we go wrinkled and brittle along with our materials until our lives subside into the past, to become the very substance of time.”
A Man’s Gotta Know His Limitations
At one point the narrator admits to being perplexed by the character trait of an associate who is fully aware of his limitations but never lets that knowledge impact him. Interestingly enough, the narrator is also a man who is intimately aware of his own limitations. Well, at least as far as the limitations of a historian who is more than a bit foggy on the details the entire Middle Ages extend. Still, the man does know his breakfast cereal aisle:
“The Medieval Era? Which was the same as the Middle Ages? Which was the same as the Dark Ages? I wasn’t qualified. When it came to that era, I was less its expert than its citizen, its denizen, its illiterate peasant in the middling dark. I mean, I knew when the 15th century was, between the 14th and the 16th, but that was like saying I knew where the Sugar Pops were in the A&P, in the cereal aisle below the Cocoa Puffs and Cocoa Krispies.”
Nobody Explains the Spanish Inquisition!
Explaining the origin and ideological anti-Semitic genius of the Spanish Inquisition is the centerpiece of Netanyahu’s thesis in a lecture he presents on the history of Jewish persecution in Iberia. Footnotes and references are not attached to the lecture so the reader must either do the research or take Netanyahu’s word on the purpose behind creating the Inquisition. One has to admit, however, that whether factual or not, it is compelling:
“Judaism had always been defined, and defined itself, primarily as a religion—as a set of tenets, and a set of practices—but the genius of the Spanish Inquisition was to insist it was a race, with the implication that even a convert to Christianity, even a fervent new Christian, was still a Jew at heart, because Judaism inhered in the blood. Once these new Christians were racialized back into a Jewish identity, they could once again be oppressed”
