In Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, the fortuneteller unfurls her skirts, hoists her bodice, strolls downstage and heckles the audience. Oh, she can tell the future, all right. "Nothing easier," she says. "But who can tell your past, eh? Nobody! You lie awake nights trying to know your past. What did it mean? What was it trying to say to you? Think! Think!"
Think, indeed. The only action one can take toward the past is to think about it. This may be the one way the past is ever changed, by the mind's reviewing all the historical laundry that blizzarded down in an undifferentiated heap when the past was taking place, then sorting it out in chaste, clean piles. It never makes sense, even when considering years as recent as the past 60. What really happened? History relies on memory, and memory on will. An 11th century Chinese emperor possessed a newly invented clock, which his people knew about, though no one owned a clock but he. When the emperor died, the imperial clock was allowed to fall apart, and everyone forgot that such a device had ever existed. Five hundred years later, Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit priest, arrived in Asia bearing a new Italian invention called a clock. The Chinese marveled at the thing.
What clocks have we forgotten in the past 60 years? Which among the clocks preserved ought in fact to be forgotten, set aside on a distant shelf like a porcelain dog? This midsection
chunk of the 20th century presents the problem amply, with its abundance of wars, villains, scientific miracles, remappings of the earth. Six decades of speeches, treaties, books, bombs, pills, screams and rockets. What will have mattered in the long run? And what does "mattered" mean? There is the fact, and the idea, and the person who has the idea.
The fact was that Rosa Parks got tired of being told to give up her seat on the bus to any white man who happened along, so she got off that bus, to be followed by almost all the blacks in Montgomery, Ala. Thus began modern American civil rights legislation. Or did it start instead with Martin Luther King, who saw where boycotting segregated buses might lead, or with Gandhi, whose example taught King the tactics of civil disobedience? Or rather were the civil rights laws of the 1960s passed because of a general and amorphous sense of national shame to which Parks and King served merely as goads? U.S. civil rights legislation mattered very much to Americans; will it have mattered to the rest of the world? Will America have mattered to the rest of the world after a hundred more 60-year periods have vanished, and will we stand in regard to the curious nations of the future as the Etruscans or the Titans do to us?