As I said, I'm currently working on a presentation exploring the oppression of memory via Tacitus. I wanted to start with the opening anecdote from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, but then when I actually read through the material set for the class, I realised the entire story was paraphrased, partially quoted, and discussed. My oh-so-brilliant idea was not that original (and not that brilliant). Along the same lines, I've just started reading The Gulag Archipelago and I was particularly struck by the preface, where Solzhenitsyn discusses his relationship with the past through an anecdote. I read it through three times one after the other, trying to pin the metaphor down. I have no intention of wedging it into my presentation, but I really like it.
In 1949 some friends and I came upon a noteworthy news items in Nature, a magazine of the Academy of Sciences. […] In the course of of excavations on the Kolyma river a subterranean ices lens had been discovered which was actually a frozen stream – and in it were found frozen specimens of prehistoric fauna some tens of thousands of years old. Whether fish or salamander, these were preserved in so fresh a state […] that those present immediately broke open the ice encasing the specimens and devoured them with relish on the spot.[…]We understood instantly. […] We understood because we ourselves were the same kind of people as those present at that event.[…]Decades go by, and the scars and sores of the past are healing over for good. In the course of this period some of the islands in the Archipelago have shuddered and dissolved and the polar sea of oblivion rolls over them. And someday in the future, this Archipelago, its air, and the bones of its inhabitants, frozen in a lens of ice, will be discovered by our descendants like some improbable salamander.[…]I would not be so bold as to try to write the history of the Archipelago. […] Perhaps I shall be able to give some account of the bones and flesh of that salamander – which, incidentally, is still alive.
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