The facts, factors in historical analysis are often psychological, environmental, economic, social, political, and cultural. Memory is life. It is always carried by groups of living people, and therefore it is in permanent evolution. It is subject to the dialectics of remembering and forgetting, unaware of its successive deformations, open to all kinds of use and manipulation. Sometimes it remains latent for long periods, then suddenly revives.
History is the always incomplete and problematic reconstruction of what is no longer there.
While life must be lived forward it can only be understood backward. I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, nor to scorn human actions, but to understand them. His contrasting meanings represent the two sides of the culture coin. Mixing with the world has a marvelously clarifying effect on your judgment. We are confined and pent up within ourselves, and our sight has contracted to the length of our own noses.