音频下载[点击右键另存为][00:00.00]Passage 21. Two Ways of Thinking of History

[00:06.34]There are two ways of thinking of history.

[00:10.60]There is, first, history regarded as a way of looking at other things,

[00:16.19]really the temporal aspect of anything,

[00:19.03]from the universe to this nib with which I am writing.

[00:22.88]Everything has its history.

[00:25.07]There is the history of the universe,if only we knew it

[00:28.78]—and we know something of it, if we do not know much.

[00:32.94]Nor is the contrast so great,when you come to think of it,

[00:37.64]between the universe and this pen-nib.

[00:40.71]A mere pen-nib has quite a considerable history.

[00:44.87]There is, to begin with, what has been written with it,

[00:49.14]and that might be something quite important.

[00:52.20]After all it was probably only one quill-pen or a couple that wrote Hamlet.

[00:59.09]Whatever has been written with the pen-nib is part of its History.

[01:03.79]In addition to that there is the history of its manufacture:

[01:08.28]this particular nib is a “Relief” nib, No. 314,

[01:13.64]made by R. Esterbrook and Co. in England,

[01:18.13]who supply the Midland Bank with pen-nibs, from whom I got it—a gift, I may say.

[01:24.37]But behind this nib there is the whole process of manufacture....

[01:29.40]In fact a pen nib implies universe,and the history of it implies its history.

[01:36.30]We may regard this way of looking at it—history—as the time-aspect of all things:

[01:42.85]a pen-nib, the universe,the fiddle before me as I write,

[01:47.23]as a relative conception of history.

[01:50.19]There is, secondly, what we might call a substantive conception of history,

[01:55.33]what we usually mean by it, history proper as a subject of study in itself.