LETTERS
We asked for comment on the proposition that we'd better stop debasing history by demanding that it be "relevant" to our lives, and begin to find out, instead, how we can relate our lives to the challenge of history. Three sailors respond here. Stanley Gerr sailed in the full-rigged ship Tusitala; Karl Kortum in the bark Kaiulani; Pete Seeger sails in the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater today. We are delighted at omnibuses painted with more verve than we paint such things today, at the idea of our cultural inheritance in language as a functional item of our voyaging in time, at Pete Seeger's defiance of doomsayers, on behalf of the forecastle gang. Reader, we hope you share our delight. We'll never publish anything more important.-ED.
IN CLIO'S CAUSE:
George Street at Hunter, Sydney, Australia, in the 1880s. A photograph given to Karl Kortum by the marine artist Oswald L. Brett in March 1973.
Gerr, Kortum, Seeger Respond History the Key to Man's Work
Your concern about the decline in the study of history despite its immense importance provokes in me the following thought: The whole intellectual enterprise of man is, I believe, to correlate the two clearly recognizable aspects of reality: structure and function. He's constantly addressed to this task in all areas of his experience and of his intervention in the world-the physical universe, the social scheme of things, etc. In so far as society is concerned, only the past has structure (the future is unborn and the present too fleeting), so that we must study history if we are to realize how society functions (has functioned) in terms of its structure, and how the structure is and becomes ever more entwined with function: history must provide the key. The evolution of the language of command at sea, a thing much in my mind, is an example of this. This highly structured special language, cast from the crucible of experience, becomes an essential part of the functional equipment of the ship. It is as vital to her sailing as block and tackle, yards, sail. Without it the machine of the ship cannot function, not with the efficiency required to make the voyage. STANLEY GERR East Haddam, Conn.
At the Bottom of a Downswing, Hope from Man's Organic Inheritance
Os Brett's photograph, with its goodlooking omnibuses, comes to us from better times. Everything went slower; there was, consequently, more interaction between human beings. There was a warming feeling for the beasts that labored along with man. The buildings were still in relationship to the creatures that put them up; they were not machines for processing data forty stories high. Things were so inefficient that there was-above all-work. And out of work came self-respect. It was the breed at a happier point in time. Since then we have done a better job of abating pain, and there is now an electronic screen with entertainment for invalids and shut-ins. These two things are the only net gain that man has achieved. We have extended life but thrown the old people out of the house. We have instituted some measure of social security, but spoiled it with the movement to the cities. We have done some wondrous scientific thinking with the comparatively paltry net benefit mentioned above. The deficit side of our science (we were able to kill 40 million people in the second world war) we all know. The internal combustion engine and
the telephone, for instance, have contributed more to pain and death than they have to peace and civility. (Modern, efficient war would be lost without them.) We have to regretfully dismiss this pair as a minus. War, ultimate war. .. l don't even know how to think about that. But a creature on another planet in another puff of worlds in a galaxy on the other side of the sun may some day give the fact that it has happened a passing glance in his morning headlines. In addition to scientific thinking, we have done other kinds of thinking. But about half of this thinking thinks that we shouldn't think at all. Philosophy, which used to be the highest manifestation of this other kind of thinking, is in disrepute, which in itself says something. We have lightened the work load (and that probably should be added to my list of two achievements) but, characteristically, have let the lightening process run on until there is a whole stratum of society who can't
Clio, Greek goddess of history, is one of the nine Muses who preside over man's arts. The first museum, Plato's Academy, source of a discourse not ended in our time, was dedicated as a temple to the Muses.
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