History Teaches Perspective, Lots Of Perspective

Everybody needs a goal in life. For some people that goal would be climbing Mount Rainier, or making a hole-in-one, or something frivolous like leaving the world a better place.

My goal, however, is far more difficult: I have vowed to devour the entire history of the world, from the Paleolithic onward, by reading all 11 volumes and 10,000 or so pages of “The Story of Civilization,” which is Will and Ariel Durant’s classic account of, basically, everything.

I can’t believe I ever came up with such an arduous, demanding and, need I say, boring goal. I could have picked something simple, something do-able, such as sailing solo around the world on a Barney air mattress, or memorizing the 1997 federal budget.

But somehow, seized by perhaps the world’s weirdest midlife crisis, I got it into my head that I could easily polish off this project within my allotted three-score and 10 years.

However, at age 43, considerably past the halfway point of my allotted years, I have actually read only three volumes. At this rate I will be 135 years old before I finish all 11 volumes, which means I really have to do something to control my cholesterol now.

I am making the situation sound far worse than it is. I didn’t embark on this project until about seven years ago, so at my present rate of one volume every two years, I will be done in only 15 years, well under my deadline (and I do mean dead line).

However, a volume every two years might be just a bit optimistic. I whipped through the first three volumes rather quickly, but I have hit a lull recently. I have been stuck on page 621 of the current volume since about - let me check my watch - 1994.

I’ll explain why I am in this rut in a minute, but first let me explain why on God’s green earth I would want to tackle this project.

Even as a kid, I have always been fascinated by history. I was probably the only kid in fifth grade who actually read H.G. Wells’ “The Outline of History,” and definitely the only kid who enjoyed it.

I liked history because I thought it was only fair to find out what had happened on this planet before my own particular arrival. So many dead people, stretching back into antiquity - I figured I owed them the courtesy of being at least moderately interested in what happened to them.

Most of what happened to them was bad, of course: wars, famines, Black Plagues and Inquisitions. Most people find this depressing, but I found it quite cheery. Here I was, growing up in an era in which The Bomb was an ever-present threat, wars were flaring up in Southeast Asia, and society seemed to be breaking down all around. Yet no matter how bad things seemed, history showed me somebody else had it worse.

History also showed me that people have always been convinced that society was breaking down. I found this comforting, despite the fact that occasionally they were right.

So I majored in history in college, at which point I realized it had no practical value. However, I continued to read history, and about seven years ago I came across a volume of “The Story of Civilization” in a used-book store. I found myself fascinated by its scope, its erudition and its sheer poundage.

Then, my wife found the entire 11-volume set in a used-book store, and she gave them to me for a birthday present. Some men celebrate their middle-age-hood by getting a Corvette or having a nervous breakdown. I celebrated mine by making my “Civilization” vow, not that I’m ruling out a nervous breakdown.

Anyway, I did quite well in the first two volumes. I also breezed through “The Age of Voltaire” (no, I didn’t go in chronological order) because I like Voltaire. But, honestly, I have been slogging through the subsequent volume, “Rousseau and Revolution.”

Sample passage: “Kant tried to counter Hume’s skepticism of causation by making the cause-and-effect relation not an objective reality but an intrinsic form of thought; as such it is independent of experience, and is not subject to the uncertainty of empirical ideas.”

See what I’m up against?

I’m going to keep slogging away on this, but right now the Vegas odds are 2-to-1 against me.

Oh well. After reading about Rousseau and Kant, I can take defeat more philosophically.

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