4 ms·
The scope of one person's life is almost unimaginable. For every one thing we know about a prominent person's life, there's a thousand more we can never know an
by vinceguidry 9y ago
The scope of one person's life is almost unimaginable. For every one thing we know about a prominent person's life, there's a thousand more we can never know and only guess about.
As a result, we generally severely underestimate historical peoples, because there's just too much stuff there to get to know it all. We're constantly reifying facts and narrative to fit extremely complex events. We have to do it to our own lives, and the lives of the people around us, yet even the people we know the most intimately have vast swaths of their inner lives that you will never be able to fathom.
- danharaj 9y ago> As a result, we generally severely underestimate historical peoples, because there's just too much stuff there to get to know it all. We're constantly reifying facts and narrative to fit extremely complex events. We have to do it to our own lives, and the lives of the people around us, yet even the people we know the most intimately have vast swaths of their inner lives that you will never be able to fathom. One of the most difficult tasks of a historian is to recover the possibilities latent in the past. This is perhaps even more difficult than ascertaining what did occur.
- H4CK3RM4N 9y agoChris-Chan is arguably the most documented person in history(click around sonichu.com for some idea of the scope of documentation), but there's still so much of the minutiae of their life which is unknown, but they would probably consider those things incredibly important.