Erasing History Quotes

You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.

I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible...

One cannot and must not try to erase the past merely because it does not fit the present.

History written in pencil is easily erased, but crayon is forever.

My history is long, and not much of it is good. I can't erase it, but I'm determined not to make another mistake. Not when the stakes are high, not when it comes to you.

I sound contemptuous, but I am not. I am interested--intrigued even--by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.

I want to reach back into my history with a grade-school pink eraser, scrubbing away my decisions like mistakes on a math test. To bad I drew my mistakes in ink.

History cannot be erased or altered.Because that would mean killing yourself.

The Suicide Not a single star will be left in the night. The night will not be left. I will die and, with me, the weight of the intolerable universe. I shall erase the pyramids, the medallions, the continents and faces. I shall erase the accumulated past. I shall make dust of history, dust of dust. Now I am looking on the final sunset. I am hearing the last bird. I bequeath nothingness to no one.

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.” Sara looked directly into his eyes. “If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.

The first step in liquidating a people,' said Hubl, 'is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.

The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have someone write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.

I have no routines or personal history. One day I found out that they were no longer necessary for me and, like drinking, I dropped them. One must have the desire to drop them and then one must proceed harmoniously to chop them off, little by little. If you have no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with your acts. And above all no one pins you down with their thoughts. It is best to erase all personal history because that makes us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people. I have, little by little, created a fog around me and my life. And now nobody knows for sure who I am or what I do. Not even I. How can I know who I am, when I am all this?

Remember that folklore is passed from one generation to the next to teach us about our past. If we lose it, we lose the links to our past. It only takes one desperate generation to change history- even erase it.

There is a picture of me in their heads, a picture of someone I don't know yet. She is not the chubby girl with the braces and bad perm. She is not the girl hiding in the bathroom at recess. She is someone new, a blank slate they have named beautiful. That is what I am now: beautiful, with this new body and face and hair and clothes. Beautiful, with this erasing of history.

Time has a different meaning for me, and these events that seem so monumental in the moment will one day be nothing more than a line in a scroll. These humans are but letters to be inked into history. A hundred years from now, I will be free. I will have forgotten their names and faces, and the struggles they have will not matter. Time has a way of burying things, shifting like the desert and swallowing entire civilizations, erasing them from map and memory. Always, in the end, everything returns to dust.

The stupid, smug whims of one unworthy man had left fingerprints on history that weren’t likely to be erased.

I am immortal and you are a footnote. I will erase you from my history and you will vanish unremembered by this world

White Sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone. My hands dangled from the cuffs of my jacket as if they weren’t my own. I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew -the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in-an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them.

That's the tricky thing about being bonded to someone for life. Blake and his dad are bonded like I'm bonded with Erin. We're irrevocably tied together by history, a history that can never be erased. Even if you want to deny it, even it you want to pretend it never existed, it will always be a part of you. It will always, in some way, define who you are.

Look, without our stories, without the true nature and reality of who we are as People of Color, nothing about fanboy or fangirl culture would make sense. What I mean by that is: if it wasn't for race, X-Men doesn't sense. If it wasn't for the history of breeding human beings in the New World through chattel slavery, Dune doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the history of colonialism and imperialism, Star Wars doesn't make sense. If it wasn't for the extermination of so many Indigenous First Nations, most of what we call science fiction’s contact stories doesn't make sense. Without us as the secret sauce, none of this works, and it is about time that we understood that we are the Force that holds the Star Wars universe together. We’re the Prime Directive that makes Star Trek possible, yeah. In the Green Lantern Corps, we are the oath. We are all of these things—erased, and yet without us—we are essential.

It only takes one desperate generation to change history—even erase it.

That version, as with so many of the stories we tell about our history, erased a woman- a plain, bad heroine- in favor of a less messy and more palatable yarn about two feuding brothers from New England.

The purpose of all families in their lives and in their deaths is to create the traitor who will finally erase their history forever.

Illness might progressively vanish so might identity. Grief might be diminished, but so might tenderness. Traumas might be erased but so might history. Infirmities might disappear, but so might vulnerability. Chance would become mitigated, but so, inevitably, would choice.

If you want to draw some advantage from your history, you must accept not only this miracle but also many others. In memory, everything can become miraculous. All you have to do is wish it, and freezing winter turns into spring, miserable rooms fill up with golden tapestries, murderers turn good, and children who cry out of loneliness receive caring teachers who are really the children themselves moved back from adulthood to their early years. Yes, my daughter, the past is not fixed and unalterable. With faith and will we can change it, not erasing its darkness but adding lights to it to make it more and more beautiful, the way a diamond is cut.

The only test, Baker, is how not to erase ourselves from the map. Our history is that things don't last. Every generation creates the right monsters to destroy itself.

To feel our character, our personality, and our personal, hard-won history fade from being is to be exposed to whatever lies beneath these comforting, operational conveniences. What remains when the conscious and functioning self has been erased is mankind's fundamental condition – irrational, violent, guilt-wracked, despairing, and mad.

This is the human paradox of altitude: that it both exalts the individual mind and erases it. Those who travel to mountain tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion.

But shame is not a pleasant feeling, and some Japanese politicians are always trying to change our children’s history textbooks so that these genocides and tortures are not taught to the next generation. By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame.

Words, I've come to learn, are pulleys through time. Portals into other minds. Without words, what remains? Indecipherable customs. Strange rites. Blighted hearts. Without words, we're history's orphans. Our lives and thoughts erased

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.

By changing our history and our memory, they try to erase all our shame.

history wasn’t just written by the victors. First it had to be erased and rewritten. Replacing troublesome truth with self-serving myth.

We know of no spectacle more ridiculous—or more contemptible—than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our republic. Or who try to do so. Is it possible that, in their vanity and stupidity, they suppose that they can erase the name of Thomas Jefferson and replace it with the name of some faith-based mediocrity whose name is already obscure? If so, we cheerfully resolve to mock them, and to give them the lie in their teeth.

But Mehrunnisa did not know then, would never know, by giving her blessings to this marriage she had set into progress a chain of events that would eventually erase her name from history's pages. Or that Arjumand would become the only Mughal woman posterity would easily recognize. Docile, seemingly tractable and troublesome Arjumand would eclipse even Mehrunnisa, cast her in a shadow...because of the monument Khurram would build in Arjumand's memory - the Taj Mahal.

You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them. If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can't erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.

The accounts of rape, wife beating, forced childbearing, medical butchering, sex-motivated murder, forced prostitution, physical mutilation, sadistic psychological abuse, and other commonplaces of female experi ence that are excavated from the past or given by contemporary survivors should leave the heart seared, the mind in anguish, the conscience in upheaval. But they do not. No matter how often these stories are told, with whatever clarity or eloquence, bitterness or sorrow, they might as well have been whispered in wind or written in sand: they disappear, as if they were nothing. The tellers and the stories are ignored or ridiculed, threatened back into silence or destroyed, and the experience of female suffering is buried in cultural invisibility and contempt… the very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its overwhelming pervasiveness and constancy, is negated. It is negated in the transactions of everyday life, and it is negated in the history books, left out, and it is negated by those who claim to care about suffering but are blind to this suffering. The problem, simply stated, is that one must believe in the existence of the person in order to recognize the authenticity of her suffering. Neither men nor women believe in the existence of women as significant beings. It is impossible to remember as real the suffering of someone who by definition has no legitimate claim to dignity or freedom, someone who is in fact viewed as some thing, an object or an absence. And if a woman, an individual woman multiplied by billions, does not believe in her own discrete existence and therefore cannot credit the authenticity of her own suffering, she is erased, canceled out, and the meaning of her life, whatever it is, whatever it might have been, is lost. This loss cannot be calculated or comprehended. It is vast and awful, and nothing will ever make up for it.

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.” Sara looked directly into his eyes.

You can hide memories, suppress them, but you can’t erase the history that produced them

History buried becomes history repeated. A whole generation of Africans have been denied the truth of their own history, and so we do not really know ourselves, or our countries. Reclaiming those erased or hidden histories is vital political and creative work, and is central to my purpose as a writer.

He had lived without her before. He could get over it! In a year or so he'd be able to walk straight past her without his heart so much as missing a beat. He needed her as much as a drunk needs a cork! But he understood all too quickly how vain these thoughts were. How can you tear something out of your heart? Your heart isn't made out of paper and your life isn't written down in ink. You can't erase the imprint of years.

In the process Paul laid out a comprehensive theory of poverty, of a world designed by the elites of all nations to serve their own ends, the pieces of the design enshrined in ideologies, which erased the histories of how things came to be as they were.

She wanted to call Claire over, show her these photos, tell her what Julian had just said, try to explain, or to try to start to explain, what her life had been. How this show might begin to convey it all, the palimpsest that was her heart, the way things could be written over but never erased. She was simply never going to be a blank slate.

Memories die as soon as they are plucked from their surroundings, they burst, lose color, lose suppleness, stiffen like corpses. All that remains are shells with translucent edges. Half-erased brain platelets are a slippery terrain, deceptive. One’s mental archive is locked, it languishes in the dark. The past is riddled with holes, souvenirs can’t help here. Everything must be thrown away. Everything. And perhaps everyone as well.

He waved his hand; and it was as though, with an invisible feather wisk, he had brushed away a little dust, and the dust was Harappa, was Ur of the Chaldees; some spider-webs, and they were Thebes and Babylon and Cnossos and Mycenae. Whisk. Whisk—and where was Odysseus, where was Job, where were Jupiter and Gotama and Jesus? Whisk—and those specks of antique dirt called Athens and Rome, Jerusalem and the Middle Kingdom—all were gone. Whisk—the place where Italy had been empty. Whisk, the cathedrals; whisk, whisk, King Lear and the Thoughts of Pascal. Whisk, Passion; whisk, Requiem; whisk, Symphony; whisk...

We live and die by our stories if we don't rewrite our own history. The past is merely what we make of it, the future ours to create. Rewrite revise, erase.

I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew...

Without words, we're history's orphans. Our lives and thoughts erased.

Living in the wake means living the history and present of terror, from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday Black existence; living the historically and geographically dis/continuous but always present and endlessly reinvigorated brutality in, and on, our bodies while even as that terror is visited on our bodies the realities of that terror are erased.

Einstein said the arrow of time flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said the past is never dead; it's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always. And who among us, offered the chance, would not relive the day or hour in which we first knew love, or ecstasy, or made a choice that forever altered our future, negating a life we might have had? Such chances are rarely granted. Memory and grief prove Faulkner right enough, but Einstein knew the finality of action. If I cannot change what I had for lunch yesterday, I certainly cannot unmake a marriage, erase the betrayal of a friend, or board a ship that left port twenty years ago.

The Black homosexual is hard pressed to gain audience among his heterosexual brothers; even if he is more talented, he is inhibited by his silence or his admissions. This is what the race has depended on in being able to erase homosexuality from our recorded history. The "chosen" history. But the sacred constructions of silence are futile exercises in denial. We will not go away with our issues of sexuality. We are coming home. It is not enough to tell us that one was a brilliant poet, scientist, educator, or rebel. Whom did he love? It makes a difference. I can't become a whole man simply on what is fed to me: watered-down versions of Black life in America. I need the ass-splitting truth to be told, so I will have something pure to emulate, a reason to remain loyal.

Imagine the terrestrial timespan as an outstretched arm: a single swipe of an emery-board, across the nail of the third finger, erases human history. We haven't been around for very long. And we've turned the earth's hair white. Sh e seemed to have eternal youth but now she's ageing awful fast, like an addict, like a waxless candle. Jesus, have you seen her recently? we used to live and die without any sense of the planet getting older, of mother earth getting older, living and dying. We used to live outside history. But now we're all coterminous. We're inside history now all right, on its leading edge, with the wind ripping past our ears. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. And maybe love can't bear it either, and flees all planets when they reach this condition, when they get to the end of their twentieth centuries.

History is a narrative enterprise, and the telling of stories that are true, that affirm and explain our existence, is the fundamental task of the historian. But truth is delicate, and it has many enemies. Perhaps that is why, although we academics are supposedly in the business of pursuing the truth, the word “truth” is rarely uttered without hedges, adornments, and qualifications. Every time we tell a story about a great atrocity, like the Holocaust or Pingfang, the forces of denial are always ready to pounce, to erase, to silence, to forget. History has always been difficult because of the delicacy of the truth, and denialists have always been able to resort to labeling the truth as fiction. One has to be careful, whenever one tells a story about a great injustice. We are a species that loves narrative, but we have also been taught not to trust an individual speaker. Yes, it is true that no nation, and no historian, can tell a story that completely encompasses every aspect of the truth. But it is not true that just because all narratives are constructed, that they are equally far from the truth. The Earth is neither a perfect sphere nor a flat disk, but the model of the sphere is much closer to the truth. Similarly, there are some narratives that are closer to the truth than others, and we must always try to tell a story that comes as close to the truth as is humanly possible. The fact that we can never have complete, perfect knowledge does not absolve us of the moral duty to judge and to take a stand against evil.

I want to reach back into my history with a grade-school pink eraser, scrubbing away my decisions like mistakes on a math test. Too bad I drew my mistakes in ink.

The history of the human race is the history of human hatred. Even love cannot erase such intense hatred.

Standing quietly in the shade of the literary giant Dostoyevsky, his wife Anna is often erased from the historical record.

Many of the greatest tyrants on the records of history have begun their reigns in the fairest manner. But the truth is, this unnatural power corrupts both the heart and the understanding. And to prevent the least hope of amendment, a king is ever surrounded by a crowd of infamous flatterers, who find their account in keeping him from the least light of reason, till all ideas of rectitude and justice are utterly erased from his mind.

Glaciers had crushed this region in the time before history. There’d been a drought for years, and a bronze fog of dust stood over the plains. The soybean crop was dead again, and the failed, wilted cornstalks were laid out on the ground like rows of underthings. Most of the farmers didn’t even plant anymore. All the false visions had been erased. It felt like the moment before the Savior comes. And the Savior did come, but we had to wait a long time.

the first step in liquidating a people . . . is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.

Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made.

The best thing we can do with the failures of the past is to let them be history. Yes, it happened. Certainly it hurt. And it may still hurt, but he has acknowledged his failure and asked your forgiveness. We cannot erase the past, but we can accept it as history. We can choose to live today free from the failures of yesterday. Forgiveness is not a feeling; it is a commitment. It

Rome fell silently to ruins. A New city rose in its place, and it was too erased by emptiness. Like phantom Giants, cities, kingdoms, and countries swiftly fell and disappeared into emptiness-- swallowed up in the black maw of the Infinite

After the Holocaust, it has become almost impossible to conceal large-scale crimes against humanity. Our modern communication-driven world, especially since the upsurge of electronic media, no longer allows human-made catastrophes to remain hidden from the public eye or to be denied. And yet, one such crime has been erased almost totally from the global public memory: the dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 by Israel. This, the most formative event in the modern history of the land of Palestine, has ever since been systematically denied, and is still today not recognised as an historical fact, let alone acknowledged as a crime that needs to be confronted politically as well as morally.

When I say "I am filled with rage," the criminal says, "But why?"And when I blow things up and make life generally unlivable for the criminal (is my life not unlivable too?) the criminal is shocked, surprised. But nothing can erase my rage- not an apology, not a sum of money, not the death of the criminal- for this wrong can never be made right, and only the impossible can make me still: can a way be found to make what happened not have happened?

History will be erased in the universal purgatory.

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.” Sara

This is a book about a radical idea. An idea that’s long been known to make rulers nervous. An idea denied by religions and ideologies, ignored by the news media and erased from the annals of world history. At the same time, it’s an idea that’s legitimised by virtually every branch of science. One that’s corroborated by evolution and confirmed by everyday life.

She had been molded and erased and silenced for safety. She had been denied the truth for safety. Her history had been cleaved almost in two, for safety. They had almost broken her, for the sake of making her safe, for the sake of their love for her, and she would carry the wound of it all her life.

I have no vision of any future, maitrakh. Not yours; not even mine. I was just thinking about children. Trying to imagine what it’s like to try to raise them. Wondering how much of their character a family can mold, and how much is innate in the children themselves." She hesitated. "Wondering if the evil in a family’s history can be erased, or whether it always passes itself on to each new generation.

In Viridia, women were oppressed because men were afraid of them. Women had ruled this country. And history had denigrated them. Erased them. Nomi was certain this wasn't what Renzo had been taught. He would have told her. But the Superior knew. Whoever had given her this book knew. And now she did too.

She could still smell the fires that had raged throughout her eighth and ninth years – the smoke of burning books chock-full of ancient, irreplaceable knowledge, the screams of gifted seers and healers as they’d been consumed by the flames, the storefronts and sacred places shattered and desecrated and erased from history.

You can hide memories, suppress them, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.’ Sara looked directly into his eyes. ‘If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.

Marlena and I were very different, but sometimes, when we were together, we could erase our separate histories just by talking, sharing a joke or a look. But in the kitchen with Mom, the kitchen that was always clean, where there was always something to eat, where the water flowed predictably from the tap and behind every cabinet door were dishes, only dishes, I saw how wrong I was to feel like Marlena and I had so much in common, and how lucky. Because here was the difference that mattered. My skinny mom with her Chardonnay smell and her forgetting to unplug the flat iron, with her corny jokes about broccoli farts and her teeth bared in anger and her cleaning gloves in the backseat of the car, my mom who refused to stop loving me, who made dumb mistakes and drank too much and was my twin in laughter, my mom who would never, ever, leave, who I trusted so profoundly that a world without her in it exceeded the limits of my imagination. That was the difference, and it was huge, and my never seeing it before is something that I still regret.

The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billion years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to. Stephen Jay Gould expressed it succinctly in a well-known line: “Humans are here today because our particular line never fractured—never once at any of the billion points that could have erased us from history.

For many of these women," Nella whispered, "this may be the only place their names are recorded. The only place they will be remembered. It is a promise I made to my mother, to preserve the existence of these women whose names would otherwise be erased from history. The world is not kind to us...There are few places for a woman to leave an indelible mark." I finished tracing an entry, moving on to the next one. "But this register preserves them -- their names, their memories, their worth.

Desire becomes overlaid with shame, and as a result, girls start to conceal their “vital, curious, pleasure-loving soul.” We dissociate ourselves from her, erase her from our histories, because it’s easier to make our way in the world that way. On some level, Gilligan says, we’re aware of what we’re sacrificing by dissociating from our desires, but this “awareness of complicity is so shameful that it often seems easier to justify it than to experience and question what has been sacrificed.

cult of true womanhood” could not completely erase what was visible as evidence of woman’s subordinate status: she could not vote, could not own property; when she did work, her wages were one-fourth to one-half what men earned in the same job. Women were excluded from the professions of law and medicine, from colleges, from the ministry.

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new, and even the habit of denying entire nations and creating fake countries has a long pedigree. In 1931 the Japanese army staged mock attacks on itself to justify its invasion of China, and then created the fake country of Manchukuo to legitimise its conquests. China itself has long denied that Tibet ever existed as an independent country. British settlement in Australia was justified by the legal doctrine of terra nullius (‘nobody’s land’), which effectively erased 50,000 years of Aboriginal history. In the early twentieth century a favourite Zionist slogan spoke of the return of ‘a people without a land [the Jews] to a land without a people [Palestine]’. The existence of the local Arab population was conveniently ignored. In 1969 Israeli prime minister Golda Meir famously said that there is no Palestinian people and never was. Such views are very common in Israel even today, despite decades of armed conflicts against something that doesn’t exist. For example, in February 2016 MP Anat Berko gave a speech in the Israeli Parliament in which she doubted the reality and history of the Palestinian people. Her proof? The letter ‘p’ does not even exist in Arabic, so how can there be a Palestinian people? (In Arabic, ‘f’ stands for ‘p’, and the Arabic name for Palestine is Falastin.)

I dreamed of setting it up out here in front of where I am sitting now, on the tripod that I would have ordered too, and starting, taking my time, to focus on a curling line of water, a piece of the world indifferent to the fact that there is language, that there are names to describe things, and grammar and verbs. My eye, solitary, filled with its own history, is desperate to evade, erase, forget; it is watching now, watching fiercely, like a scientist looking for a cure, deciding for some days to forget about words, to know at last that the words for colours, the blue-grey-green of the sea, the whiteness of the waves, will not work against thefullness of watching the rich chaos they yield and carry.

You might think that life is not as good as it used to be but the younger generation happens to think that life is wonderful. Maybe they just do not know how great things were, when you were their age. Having said that, when you were young, the older generation complained about life too and reminisced about the good old days. This pattern cannot simply be explained by the tendency of the human psyche to erase all negative memories leaving just the positive ones. The criticism is aimed at the present moment which is supposedly worse than it used to be. If you accept the fact that life is getting worse with every passing year then you would have to agree that the world should have simply fallen to pieces a long time ago. An uncountable number of generations have passed since the beginning of human history and each one believes that life’s colours have faded. Many an old man will tell you with absolute certainty how much better Coca-Cola used to be. Coca-Cola was invented in 1886. Imagine how disgusting coke must be by now if it has been consistently worsening in quality since

Much history as well as popular imagination not only erases their contingency but implicitly attributes to historical actors intentions and consciousness they could not have possibly had...Once a significant historical event is codified, it travels a sort of condensation symbol and, unless we are very careful, takes on a false logic and order that does a grave injustice to how it was experienced at the time.

How many ways can you splice a history? Price a country? Dice a people? Slice a heart? Entice what's been erased back into story? My-gritude. Have you ever taken a word in your hand, dared to shape your palm to the hollow where the fullness falls away? Have you ever pointed it back to its beginning? Felt it leap and shudder in your fingers like a dowsing rod? Jerk, like a severed thumb? Flare with the forbidden name of a goddess returning? My-gritude. Have you ever set out to search for a missing half? the piece that isn't shapely, elegant, simple. The half that's ugly, heavy, abrasive. Awkward to the hand. Gritty on the tongue. Migritude.

In American Negro Slavery (1918), along with eight more books and a duffel bag of articles, Phillips erased the truth of slavery as a highly lucrative enterprise dominated by planters who incessantly forced a resisting people to labor through terror, manipulation, and racist ideas. Instead he dreamed up an unprofitable commerce dominated by benevolent, paternalistic planters civilizing and caring for a “robust, amiable, obedient and content” barbaric people. Phillips’s pioneering use of plantation documents legitimated his racist dreams and made them seem like objective realities. Phillips remained the most respected scholarly voice on slavery until the mid-twentieth century.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able—and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years—to arrest the course of history.

SELF-HELP FOR FELLOW REFUGEES If your name suggests a country where bells might have been used for entertainment, or to announce the entrances and exits of the seasons and the birthdays of gods and demons, it's probably best to dress in plain clothes when you arrive in the United States. And try not to talk too loud. If you happen to have watched armed men beat and drag your father out the front door of your house and into the back of an idling truck, before your mother jerked you from the threshold and buried your face in her skirt folds, try not to judge your mother too harshly. Don't ask her what she thought she was doing, turning a child's eyes away from history and toward that place all human aching starts. And if you meet someone in your adopted country and think you see in the other's face an open sky, some promise of a new beginning, it probably means you're standing too far. Or if you think you read in the other, as in a book whose first and last pages are missing, the story of your own birthplace, a country twice erased, once by fire, once by forgetfulness, it probably means you're standing too close. In any case, try not to let another carry the burden of your own nostalgia or hope. And if you're one of those whose left side of the face doesn't match the right, it might be a clue looking the other way was a habit your predecessors found useful for survival. Don't lament not being beautiful. Get used to seeing while not seeing. Get busy remembering while forgetting. Dying to live while not wanting to go on. Very likely, your ancestors decorated their bells of every shape and size with elaborate calendars and diagrams of distant star systems, but with no maps for scattered descendants. And I bet you can't say what language your father spoke when he shouted to your mother from the back of the truck, "Let the boy see!" Maybe it wasn't the language you used at home. Maybe it was a forbidden language. Or maybe there was too much screaming and weeping and the noise of guns in the streets. It doesn't matter. What matters is this: The kingdom of heaven is good. But heaven on earth is better. Thinking is good. But living is better. Alone in your favorite chair with a book you enjoy is fine. But spooning is even better.

During the Pequot War, Connecticut and Massachusetts colonial officials had offered bounties initially for the heads of murdered Indigenous people and later for only their scalps, which were more portable in large numbers. But scalp hunting became routine only in the mid-1670s, following an incident on the northern frontier of the Massachusetts colony. The practice began in earnest in 1697 when settler Hannah Dustin, having murdered ten of her Abenaki captors in a nighttime escape, presented their ten scalps to the Massachusetts General Assembly and was rewarded with bounties for two men, two women, and six children.24 Dustin soon became a folk hero among New England settlers. Scalp hunting became a lucrative commercial practice. The settler authorities had hit upon a way to encourage settlers to take off on their own or with a few others to gather scalps, at random, for the reward money. “In the process,” John Grenier points out, “they established the large-scale privatization of war within American frontier communities.”25 Although the colonial government in time raised the bounty for adult male scalps, lowered that for adult females, and eliminated that for Indigenous children under ten, the age and gender of victims were not easily distinguished by their scalps nor checked carefully. What is more, the scalp hunter could take the children captive and sell them into slavery. These practices erased any remaining distinction between Indigenous combatants and noncombatants and introduced a market for Indigenous slaves. Bounties for Indigenous scalps were honored even in absence of war. Scalps and Indigenous children became means of exchange, currency, and this development may even have created a black market. Scalp hunting was not only a profitable privatized enterprise but also a means to eradicate or subjugate the Indigenous population of the Anglo-American Atlantic seaboard.26 The settlers gave a name to the mutilated and bloody corpses they left in the wake of scalp-hunts: redskins.

The Swedish town of Överkalix has the most comprehensive and oldest birth, death, and crop records in the world. Their records go back generations—a remarkably rich data set. And in analyzing this data set, scientists found some fascinating correlations. There were good and bad years for the crops in Överkalix and some particularly bad years where families were forced to go hungry. But scientists discovered that when children suffered starvation between the ages of nine and twelve, their grandchildren would on average live thirty years longer. Their descendants had far lower rates of diabetes and heart disease. On the other hand, when children were well-fed during those ages, their descendants were at four times the risk for heart attacks and their life expectancy dropped. In some strange way, the trauma of starvation changed descendants’ genes to be more resilient. Healthier. More likely to survive.[5] — Clearly, it wasn’t just my ruthless nurture that had shaped me into who I was, though who knows what kind of rampant methylation savaged my epigenome during my beatings and assaults. Beyond that, every cell in my body is filled with the code of generations of trauma, of death, of birth, of migration, of history that I cannot understand. Just piecemeal moments I collected from Auntie over the years. My family tried to erase this history. But my body remembers. My work ethic. My fear of cockroaches. My hatred for the taste of dirt. These are not random attributes, a spin of the wheel. They were gifted to me with purpose, with necessity. I want to have words for what my bones know. I want to use those gifts when they serve me and understand and forgive them when they do not.

At some point, I realized that museums and libraries (in what I imagine must have been either a hard-won gesture of goodwill, or in order not to appear irrelevant) had removed many nineteenth-century historically specific markers--such as slave, colored, and Negro--from their titles or archives, and replaced these words instead with the sanitized, but perhaps equally vapid, African-American. In order to replace this historical erasure of slavery (however well intended), I re-erased the postmodern African-American, then changed those titles back. That is, I re-corrected the corrected horror in order to allow that original worry to stand. My intent was to explore and record not only the history of human thought, but also how normative and complicit artists, curators, and art institutions have been in participating in--if not creating--this history.

[I]t seems that everyone has fallen under the thrall of this idea that we’re all writers and dramatists now, that each of us has a special voice and something very important to say, usually about a feeling we have, and all this gets expressed in the black maw of social media billions of times a day. Usually this feeling is outrage, because outrage gets attention, outrage gets clicks, outrage can make your voice heard above the deafening din of voices squalling over one another in this nightmarish new culture—and the outrage is often tied to a lunacy demanding human perfection, spotless citizens, clean and likable comrades, and requiring thousands of apologies daily. Advocating while creating your own drama and your brand is where the game is now. And if you don’t follow the new corporate rules accordingly you are banished, exiled, erased from history.

It is not cynical to admit the past has been turned into a fiction. It is a story, not a fact. The real has been erased. Whole eras have been added or removed. Wars have been aggrandized, and human struggle relegated to the margins. Villains are redressed as heroes. Generous, striving, imperfect men and women have been stripped of their flaws or plucked of their virtues and turned into figurines of morality or depravity. Whole societies have been fixed with motive and visions and equanimity where there was none. Suffering has been recast as noble sacrifice! Do you know why the history of the Tower is in such turmoil? Because too many powerful men are fighting for the pen, fighting to write their story over our dead bodies. They know what is at stake: immortality, the character of civilization, and influence beyond the ages. They are fighting to see who gets to mislead our grandchildren.

In the court of Nero, a person of learning, of unquestioned merit, and of unsuspected loyalty, was put to death for no other reason, than that he had a pedantic countenance which displeased the emperor. This very monster of mankind appeared in the beginning of his reign to be a person of virtue. Many of the greatest tyrants on the records of history have begun their reigns in the fairest manner. But the truth is, this unnatural power corrupts both the heart and the understanding. And to prevent the least hope of amendment, a king is ever surrounded by a crowd of infamous flatterers, who find their account in keeping him from the least light of reason, till all ideas of rectitude and justice are utterly erased from his mind. When Alexander had in his fury inhumanly butchered one of his best friends and bravest captains; on the return of reason he began to conceive an horror suitable to the guilt of such a murder. In this juncture his council came to his assistance. But what did his council? They found him out a philosopher who gave him comfort. And in what manner did this philosopher comfort him for the loss of such a man, and heal his conscience, flagrant with the smart of such a crime? You have the matter at length in Plutarch. He told him, "that let a sovereign do what he wilt, all his actions are just and lawful, because they are his.

HOW ENGLISH BECAME A DOUBLE LANGUAGE After the Romans conquered England in the first century AD, they hired German and Scandinavian mercenaries from Anglia and Saxony to help fend off pirates and put down rebellions by the native Picts and Celts. When the Roman Empire abandoned England in 410 AD, more Anglo-Saxons migrated to the island, marginalizing the Gallic-speaking Celts, wiping out the Latin of the Romans, and imposing their Germanic tongue throughout England. But 600 years later Latin came back this roundabout way: In 911 AD Danish Vikings conquered territory along the north coast of France and named it after themselves, Normandy, land of the Norsemen. After 150 years of marriage to French women, these Danes spoke what their mothers spoke, a thousand-year-old French dialect of Latin. In 1066 King Wilhelm of Normandy (a.k.a. William the Conqueror) led his armies across the English Channel and defeated the English king. With that victory, French came to England. Throughout history, foreign conquests usually erase native languages. But England was the exception. For some mysterious reason, the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons and the Latinate French of the Normans merged. As a result, the vocabulary of what became modern English doubled. English has at least two words for everything. Compare, for example, the Germanic-rooted words “fire,” “hand,” “tip,” “ham,” and “flow” to the French-derived words “flame,” “palm,” “point,” “pork,” and “fluid.

... by destroying a culture’s art, you destroy the people. (...) If you erase every reminder of their history, their symbology, everything everything that made them special and distinct in this world, then you can make those people forget who they really are. And that’s what conquerors truly want. (...) Because only after that can the conquerors get down to the business of really taking over. Of substituting their own history, their own symbols, their own meaning, on another. Of casting the conquered as outsiders in their own land. (...) Sure there are other things that go—language, clothes, food. But people have to eat. They have to clothe themselves. They need to talk. Those things can take generations to eradicate. Art on the other hand is wrongly seen as a luxury, easily stolen without consequence. But those baubles you’re talking about are far more valuable than money. And don’t you believe for a second that the people buying and selling them don’t understand that better than anyone else.

It is possible - given absolute control over the media and the police - to rewrite the memories of hundreds of millions of people, if you have a generation to accomplish it in. Almost always, this is done to improve the hold that the powerful have on power, or to serve the narcissism or megalomania or paranoia of national leaders. It throws a monkey wrench into the error-correcting machinery. It works to erase public memory of profound political mistakes, and thus to guarantee their eventual repetition. In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion pictures, and videotapes technologically within reach, with television in every home, and with critical thinking in decline, restructuring societal memories even without much attention from the secret police seems possible. What I’m imagining here is not that each of us has a budget of memories implanted in special therapeutic sessions by state-appointed psychiatrists, but rather that small numbers of people will have so much control over news stories, history books, and deeply affecting images as to work major changes in collective attitudes.

But the period I studied -- the rollicking eighteenth century engraved by Hogarth -- was the one that saw the birth of America, of women's rights, and of the novel. The novel started as a low-class form, fit only to be read by serving maids, and it is the only literary form where women have distinguished themselves so early and with such excellence that even the rampant misogyny of literary history cannot erase them. Ever wonder about women and the novel? Women, like any underclass, depend for their survival on self-definition. The novel permitted this -- and pages could still be hidden under the embroidery hoop. From the writer's mind to the reader's there was only the intervention of printing presses. You could stay at home, yet send your book abroad to London -- the perfect situation for women. In a world where women are still the second sex, many still dream of becoming writers so they can work at home, make their own hours, nurse the baby. Writing still seems to fit into the interstices of a woman's life. Through the medium of words, we have hopes of changing our class. Perhaps the pen will not always be equated with the penis. In a world of computers, our swift fingers may yet win us the world. One of these days we'll have class. And so we write as feverishly as only the dispossessed can. We write to come into our own, to build our houses and plant our gardens, to give ourselves names and histories, inventing ourselves as we go along.

Gabriel was stunned by Pandora's compassion for a man who had caused her such harm. He shook his head in wonder as he stared into her eyes, as dark as cloud-shadow on a field of blue gentian. "That doesn't excuse him," he said thickly. Gabriel would never forgive the bastard. He wanted vengeance. He wanted to strip the flesh from the bastard's corpse and hang up his skeleton to scare the crows. His fingers contained a subtle tremor as he reached out to trace the fine edges of her face, the sweet, high plane of her cheekbone. "What did the doctor say about your ear? What treatment did he give?" "It wasn't necessary to send for a doctor." A fresh flood of rage seared his veins as the words sunk in. "Your eardrum was ruptured. What in God's name do you mean a doctor wasn't necessary?" Although he had managed to keep from shouting, his tone was far from civilized. Pandora quivered uneasily and began to inch backward. He realized the last thing she needed from him was a display of temper. Battening down his rampaging emotions, he used one arm to bring her back against his side. "No, don't pull away. Tell me what happened." "The fever had passed," she said after a long hesitation, "and... well, you have to understand my family. If something unpleasant happened, they ignored it, and it was never spoken of again. Especially if it was something my father had done when he'd lost his temper. After a while, no one remembered what had really happened. Our family history was erased and rewritten a thousand times. But ignoring the problem with my ear didn't make it disappear. Whenever I couldn't hear something, or when I stumbled or fell, it made my mother very angry. She said I'd been clumsy because I was hasty or careless. She wouldn't admit there was anything wrong with my hearing. She refused even to discuss it." Pandora stopped, chewing thoughtfully on her lower lip. "I'm making her sound terrible, and she wasn't. There were times when she was affectionate and kind. No one's all one way or the other." She flicked a glance of dread in his direction. "Oh God, you're not going to pity me, are you?" "No." Gabriel was anguished for her sake, and outraged. It was all he could do to keep his voice calm. "Is that why you keep it a secret? You're afraid of being pitied?" "That, and... it's a shame I'd rather keep private." "Not your shame. Your father's." "It feels like mine. Had I not been eavesdropping, my father wouldn't have disciplined me." "You were a child," he said brusquely. "What he did wasn't bloody discipline, it was brutality." To his surprise, a touch of unrepentant amusement curved Pandora's lips, and she looked distinctly pleased with herself. "It didn't even stop my eavesdropping. I just learned to be more clever about it." She was so endearing, so indomitable, that Gabriel was wrenched with a feeling he'd never known before, as if all the extremes of joy and despair had been compressed into some new emotion that threatened to crack the walls of his heart.

Be big enough to offer the truth to people and if it short circuits them I think that's tragic. I think that's sad but, I will not strike no unholy bargains to self erase. I wont do it. I don't care how many people fucked up their lives. I don't care how many bad choices people have made. I don't care how much pettiness they've consumed and spat out. I don't care how much viciousness , rage, abuse, spanking they've dealt out. I am gonna tell the truth as I see it and I'm going to be who I fucking am and if that causes the world to shift in it's orbit and half the evil people get thrown off the planet and up into space well, you shouldn't of been standing in evil to begin with because, there is gravity in goodness. So, sorry; I have to be who I am. Everyone ells is taken. There is no other place I can go than in my own head. I can't jump from skull to skull until I find one that suits bad people around me better. I don't have that choice. So, be your fucking self. Speak your truth and if there are people around you who tempt you with nonexistence , blast through that and give them the full glory of who you are. Do not withhold yourself from the world. Do not piss on the incandescent gift of your existence. Don't drown yourself in the petty fog and dustiness of other peoples ancient superstitions, beliefs, aggressions, culture, and crap. No, be a flare. We're all born self expressive. We are all born perfectly comfortable with being incredibly inconvenient to our parents. We shit, piss, wake up at night, throw up on their shoulders, scream, and cry. We are in our essence, in our humanity, perfectly comfortable with inconveniencing others. That's how we are born. That's how we grow. That's how we develop. Well, I choose to retain the ability to inconvenience the irrational. You know I had a cancer in me last year and I'm very glad that the surgeons knife and the related medicines that I took proved extremely inconvenient to my cancer and I bet you my cancer was like "Aw shit. I hate this stuff man." Good. I'm only alive because medicine and surgery was highly inconvenient to the cancer within me. That's the only reason I'm alive. So, be who you are. If that's inconvenient to other people that's their goddamn business, not yours. Do not kill yourself because other people are dead. Do not follow people into the grave. Do not atomize yourself because, others have shredded themselves into dust for the sake of their fears and their desire to conform with the history of the dead.

History Eraser I got drunk and fell asleep atop the sheets but luckily i left the heater on. And in my dreams i wrote the best song that i've ever written...can't remember how it goes. I stayed drunk and fell awake and i was cycling on a plane and far away i heard you say you liked me. We drifted to a party -- cool. The people went to arty school. They made their paints by mixing acid wash and lemonade In my brain I re-arrange the letters on the page to spell your name I found an ezra pound and made a bet that if i found a cigarette i'd drop it all and marry you. Just then a song comes on: "you can't always get what you want" -- the rolling stones, oh woe is we, the irony! The stones became the moss and once all inhibitions lost, the hipsters made a mission to the farm. We drove by tractor there, the yellow straw replaced our hair, we laced the dairy river with the cream of sweet vermouth. In my brain I re-arrange the letters on the page to spell your name You said "we only live once" so we touched a little tongue, and instantly i wanted to... I lost my train of thought and jumped aboard the Epping as the doors were slowly closing on the world. I touched on and off and rubbed my arm up against yours and still the inspector inspected me. The lady in the roof was living proof that nothing really ever is exactly as it seems. In my brain I re-arrange the letters on the page to spell your name We caught the river boat downstream and ended up beside a team of angry footballers. I fed the ducks some krill then we were sucked against our will into the welcome doors of the casino. We drank green margaritas, danced with sweet senoritas, and we all went home as winners of a kind. You said "i guarantee we'll have more fun, drink till the moon becomes the sun, and in the taxi home i'll sing you a triffids song!" In my brain I re-arrange the letters on the page to spell your name