sickeningly sweet like honey

convince me to like history

Most people i meet who do not like history come from a sad academic background where they were unlucky enough to be taught by people who teach history as a series of dates and names to learn by heart. I don't know if that is the case for you, but I would like to start by saying that history is not that. I have a lot of thoughts on how it should be taught in school, the main one being that we should not focus on memorizing cold facts, instead we should teach people to focus on the passages, how a fact influenced the next and how itwas influenced by what happened before it. But this is not what I want to talk to you about.

There are so many facets to history, but the one that never fails to make me feel the strongest emotions, and always renews my love of learning the past, is all the facts that make me feel connected with humans as a species. I grew up with a very negative perception of humans, I made the idea that humans are inherently bad my own, I could not see humans as anything other than a plague. Don't get me wrong our species has done and continues to do horrible things, and history is more often than not a reminder of that, but that is not our nature. We are neutral creatures like everything else on this planet, our nature is not evil nor good we can do both, we have done both, and we continue to do both every day. Having such an opinion of your own species, and therefore yourself, thinking our nature is corrupted and bad does no good for your mental health believe me. But then I started to learn history differently, I learned through facts that we do have a nature that shows in repetitive actions, but most of them are daily simple things. What was truly life changing for me was studying early humans in prehistory and protohistory, classes that could not focus on politics for lack of sources, and therefore focused on humans. I learned how important and ritual has been since the dawn of time for us humans to gather together to share food drinks and stories. I thought of my family sharing a meal with food cooked by everyone, drinking food and sharing stories and laughing, and realized that that has been happening for millennia because that is deep in our nature as humans. How me showing affection to a friend by baking a loaf of bread for them is probably the most human thing I could do. How me and my family sharing a drink while telling stories of a family friend who recently passed is probably what has been done since our ancestors were travellers through the land. I learned how early humans started creating things and embellishing them for no purpose other than making them beautiful, how they made things for themselves to wear only because they thought them beautiful. There was no use or purpose to a beautiful shell to tie around your neck, other than believing it was something stunning nature made and wanting to carry it with yourself, on yourself, to make yourself beautiful with it. And I learned how not only we have always been decorating ourselves but we have always been decorating everything because leaving a mark on that wall feels like the right thing to do. A handprint in the stone age, graffiti on the buildings of ancient Rome since the age of the republic, more graffiti by people centuries after visiting italy during their grand tours, all the way to our day of writing on bathroom doors and walls and everywhere. Because we need to leave a mark.

I could tell you history is important because by learning where we have been we can avoid making the same mistakes again, because if you learn the patterns that keep repeating themselves in history you can see things coming and do something about them, because studying history and learning the gigantic game of domino it is will make you more aware than anything else about what is happening around you, and that is all true. But what makes me love history is how connected it makes me feel to people i will never see, of whom i rarely know the faces of, of whom i will never hear the voices of. Ever since i was a little kid i have had the same reacurring thought, while walking in old building, and especially while walking on old streets. I would ask myself how many people had walked right there before me, where they were going, why, what was on their mind. Were they walking? Were they wealthy enough to own a horse? Were they happy? Did they consider that a random person in the future would be wondering about them?

I cannot explain to you the thrill I feel when I walk in cities of which I know some historical drama or fact. When I walk past a building and I can answer my child-self that this and that person lived there, that I am walking the street all these people walked for this and that reason. That on the crossroad where now there's a make up store there used to be a university and some important historical figure graduated from there. That that is the square where capital punishment was given, that those stones I am walking on were once bloody or marked by tears. That the street I walk daily to go to uni is so nice because the king liked to take walks. That people in this place used to speak multiple languages so if you were there five centuries ago you'd know what sounds you'd hear. That students in the 1400s would sell used books with annotations on them, the same way I have been doing for over ten years. All these things and I have just named a random few make me feel such a wave of emotions I can hardly explain. We have been walking the same streets for millennia, because it is deep in our nature to move around. We have been making art and influencing each other ever since before we learned how to write. We have always celebrated important things with food and drink. All these things made me and still make me understand how complicated and fascinating humans are, how our nature is not evil, and how for every bad deed we have done someone has done a good counteract. Unfortunately tho most things that make it to the history books are the bad stuff humans have done.

I have no idea if this very long post made you like history, I don't even know if it was coherent at all. What i will tell you to conclude is that my comfort food ever since i was a kid is bread dipped in oil and salt. Every time i eat it i think about how many people before me have felt that comfort in eating a simple piece of bread. How my mom made me bread butter and sugar as a snack as a child because she used to eat it as a kid, how my grandma made me eat bread and walnuts because that was what she ate. How my great grandparents used to store bread during the wars so it would last more, and how my great uncle kept doing that until he passed away just a few years ago. How i could go back for centuries and centuries of ancestors who at least once took a piece of bread and ate with the same love i do, how some of those ancestors were living in what we know call prehistory, and yet so many of them did the same thing, and shared it with their family. When i tell you i have cried about bread i am not joking. Am i over emotional? Yes of course but that is not the point. History healed my relationship with humanity and our nature, healed me in so many ways, it gives me so many emotions that hit me like a train, some are good some are bad but they are there and they are worth knowing and experiencing.