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By Root 1430 0

of brute facts or that historians ought not to aim for accuracy in the accumulation and cross-correlation of those facts. The facts of history are, however, documents and artifacts of human manufacture; they cannot be understood in any terms other than the motives of their makers. There is a tiny minority of documents whose purpose is to provide an impersonal, accurate, and objective record of events, but there is a wealth of complication even in the notion of a record whose purpose is accuracy, and anyone who doubts that the compilers of supposedly objective accounts might sometimes have deceptive motives need only ask themselves whether it really is possible for economic historians to obtain a full and true picture of the financial transactions of the past by examining account books prepared to meet the requirements of tax assessment.

In order for a historian to understand the motives that lie behind the documents and artifacts that the people of the past have handed down to us it is always necessary to perform an act of imaginative identification. The historian must place himself, as it were, in the shoes of the maker: to participate as best he can in the act of making.

Without this leap of the imagination, no understanding is possible, but every honest historian will admit that any such leap is a leap in the dark, and that the conclusions at which he arrives—no matter how confident he may feel of their certainty—are the products of his own fantasy. A good historian is a scrupulous fantasist, but he is a fantasist nevertheless.

The zealots among my peers argue that if this is the case, then history is impossible and that everything sheltering under that name is false. They point out that the historians of the present do not belong to the same species as the people of the past and that our existential situation is radically different from theirs. I have heard this said many times in connection with my History of Death. Its least sympathetic critics have always argued that insofar as my work attempted to go beyond the collation of statistics it was bound to fail, for the simple reason that I, a true emortal, could not possibly perform the mental gymnastics that would be required to allow me to see the world as a mortal would have done.

According to skeptics of this stripe, the people of today cannot possibly hope to understand their ancestors, whose mental processes are and will always remain utterly mysterious to us. All we can sensibly do, such skeptics proclaim, is collate the facts of their brief existence and lay them away in the bowels of metaphorical mountains, heavily armored against our interest and involvement.

Clearly, I have never agreed with this assessment. Nor could I side with those pusillanimous historians who took refuge in the commonplace observation that people had begun talking about a New Human Race in the early part of the twenty-second century and that we could legitimately identify with those of our ancestors who merely believed—or at least hoped—that true emortality was within their grasp. It would be a poor sort of history that derived its authority from the fact that its objects were deluded—and an even poorer sort that attempted to extend its claims deeper into the past by suggesting that the people who lived in the midst of death for thousands of years did so in a state of perpetual denial, never able to accept the all-too-obvious fact that each and every one of them was bound to die, sooner rather than later.

My belief, simply stated, is that we who have drunk of the authentic fountain of youth do still have the ability—if we care to exercise it—to imagine what it was like to live with the inevitability of death. I believe that we need only to exercise our own powers of imagination cleverly enough to be able to put ourselves in the shoes of people faced with the prospect of a life span no more than a hundred years in duration, most of which would be spent in a state of decrepitude.

Not only do I believe that this is possible, but I believe that it is highly desirable. How can we understand