The Stories We Tell Ourselves

摘要

History has always been a tactile thing to me, and I like to think that I come by it honestly. I grew up on Missionary Ridge, a Civil War battlefield where you could still find Minie balls in the ground and in trees more than a century after Union troops broke the Confederate line in the autumn of 1863- As a boy, I played World War II, wearing my grandfather's old gunnery-officer Navy helmet from the Pacific. Years later, a secretary to Winston Churchill gave me one of the signed pictures of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt that had been presented to members of the prime minister's party during the White House Christmas of 1941-a souvenir that reminded me of the old lyric "I danced with a man who'sdanced with a girl who's danced with the Prince of Wales." It is true that living in the past-to be a kind of History Channel Miss Havisham-can be bad for the mind and the soul, preventing us from engaging in the batdes and causes of our own time. But when we are at our best, history and heroes enable us to look ahead, not backward. We are the sum of the stories we tell ourselves, and those stories are necessarily rooted in our experience, and by how we choose to interpret the experiences of others. These mechanics of memory create a new, present reality that then determines the future. To understand where a leader might take us, or what a friend is really like, requires understanding what they look to, and what they make of it.