from half.com to thoughts on history

Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, I made my first-ever half.com sale. One might think the decision to list things on half had to do with me turning 21 tomorrow (25 minutes and counting) and wanting to clear up my life and belongings. At the very least, that's the kind of conclusion I'd reach if I were looking back on that evidence and writing about it (please forgive the solipsism). But that really isn't what's going on... at least not on a conscious level. I was up in the attic looking for something and noticed a stack of books that I really have no use or desire for anymore (the reasons, I suppose, could go in another entry, but I don't think they're very interesting).

So any putative link made between my birthday and my cutting loose of the driftwood of my life would actually be entirely coincidental. In doing historical research, something I'm kinda sorta maybe envisioning doing for my career, this seems to be a major obstacle. There is, of course, the position that any structure or meaning given by a(n) historian to an event is necessarily artificial and distorted. Even still, there seem to be gradations of distortion.

What I'm in search of, I suppose, is a clear rule of thumb as to what constitues reasonable and resonsible conclusions drawn from a set of facts. It's not enough to say, "All histories are distortions." Well, you can say it, but it does nothing constructive. I believe that we can learn from the past, imperfect as our understanding of it might be.