Saturday, November 07, 2020
The Historical Sciences
Guy Davenport (1927-2005), "Prehistoric Eyes," in The Geography of the Imagination (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), pp. 61-67 (at 67, discussing Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man's First
Art, Symbol and Notation [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972]):
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And cognition? I would swap eyes, were it possible, with an Aurignacian hunter; I suspect his of being sharper, better in every sense. History is not linear; it is the rings of growth in a tree; and it is tragic. Mr. Marshack's study of mind twenty millennia back is a touching of ghosts in the dark, the ghosts of people from whom we are descended, whose genes we carry in our bodies. Our most diligent sciences look inward into the cell and atom, to stave off death. The historical sciences do not so obviously stave off death, but it seems to me that searching for man in his past and finding him not brutal and inarticulate but a creature of accomplished sensitivity and order, sane and perhaps more alive than we, is a shield against the forces among us that stave off life.
