Happy are those whose lives are not mangled by history.

History is a vile process. Nature, in its blithe unconcern for the individual, is destructive enough but not, as history so often seems to be, malicious. Nothing mocks the innocent pursuit of innocent happiness like history roused from slumber — for it does, thankfully, sleep from time to time, if only fitfully. The peasant masses of premodern times did not write history or fiction or anything else; their feelings are unrecorded and must be imagined. Which would dominate: numb passivity or helpless rage at the death, injury, disease, economic ruin and all the other collateral damage that war and political expediency — history, in short — inflict with such careless abandon?

The suspicion arises, as hard to dismiss as to accept, that history’s chosen engines for driving us forward are suffering, agony, destruction and death. They are the challenges we rise to; rising, we transcend our animal limitations and grow civilized; the price is appalling but the rewards undeniable. Modern life, for all its flaws and indeed horrors, is richer, more comfortable, healthier, more satisfying, more humane, more human even, for more people than anything the past presents us with, for the past at its very best spread its benefits very thinly, leaving the masses to make the best of things beyond the reach of civilization’s light.