Thursday, September 21, 2017

The Past had Once Been the Present

I was recently reading a novel and came to this paragraph. I stopped and read it a couple more times. Then I stuck a bookmark in the page.  William Martin's books are packed with history, overlaid with the present. As genealogists I think we also have one foot in the past and one in the present.




He didn’t expect that too many people thought about the world the way he did. To him, the past had once been the present…and the future. And if you looked at it like that, not only did it keep the past alive, it made the present more comprehensible and gave contour to the future’s flat horizon.





The view of life of the character, Peter Fallon as written by William Martin in Harvard Yard (Boston: Grand Central Publishing, 2003) 228.






5 comments:

  1. Our family's past definitely influences the present and the future! Thank you for this powerful quote, which I really like.

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    1. Thanks, Marian. It grabbed my attention and I wanted to share it here.

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  2. That is a beautiful passage, Colleen. Thank you for sharing.

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  3. Great quote, Colleen! Thanks for sharing it. Was the character in the book a genealogist/family historian? I'm not sure too many people other than us think about time the way we do and the way this character did.

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    1. The character is an antiques dealer, mostly antique books. In the series of books he looks for things like a Paul Revere Tea Set and a handwritten Shakespeare play. There is lots of history in the novels.

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