An Archival Quality Quotation
Wherever men have lived, there is a story to be told, and it depends chiefly on the story-teller or historian whether that is interesting or not.
I remember talking a few years ago with a young man who had undertaken to write the history of his native town, a wild and mountainous town far up-country, whose very name suggested a hundred things to me, and I almost wished I had the task to do myself, so few of the original settlers had been driven out, and not a single clerk of the exchequer buried in it. But to my chagrin I found that the author was complaining of want of materials, and that the crowning fact of his story was that the town had been the residence of General C— and the family mansion was still standing. Around this all the materials of this history were to arrange themselves.
You can't read any genuine history, as that of Herodotus or the Venerable Bede, without perceiving that our interest depends on the subject but on the man — on the manner in which he treats the subject and the importance he gives it. A feeble writer and without genius must have what he thinks a great theme, which we are already interested in through the accounts of others, but a genius — a Shakespeare, for instance — would make the history of his parish more interesting than another's history of the world. Wherever men have lived, there is a story to be told, and it depends chiefly on the story-teller or historian whether that is interesting or not.
Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits: Thoreau's Rediscovered Last Manuscript, Bradley P. Dean, ed. (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 234-235.
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