Occasionally, questions about the meaning of life pop up like toast in my life’s living, and I am forced to face myself with questions of the life worth living, the death worth dying. The whole thing, the business of life – my life – what would it choose to have been, what epitaph would it write for itself?

Here lie I: I the great, the humble, the contrite, the brave, the more than, the not quite…I. Thinking of what I have admired, a force heavy with my lost youth tells me to go out with a large bang. Some reason, some quest requited, some pay back to the gift that is my life. I push away in these moments the thoughts that life has been burdensome, difficult. I seem to want a life-experienced requiem, an ode to my own life.

Perhaps I look forward with awe to some long or short-suffering exit, and seek a way of self-justifying; a way of externalizing, blaming; a way of being sure and positive, that I can tell my self I have been worthy of life. A cause for which to die, a cause for which to have lived, some sense of right and righteousness, a life which was, in sum, deeply moral whether any force outside of life blessed it…or not. A sense for surety in a world in which, I suspect, the concept is not discoverable, much less discernible.

Just in case, I want to be ready when I hear the call; I want to be able, still, to hear the call to martyrdom: for history, for justice, for life.

There is a battle amongst those involved in the trades and markets of the downtowns and uptowns and places where the barters of life are arranged: “I am an idealist,” a number can be heard saying, “but have adjusted successfully to the exigencies and realities of life.” “Ha,” I think. “And I am a realist who tries with whatever sinews and fibers are left, to hold out a daily idealism with which to inform my life.”

The utopists, the what-if people who preach the wonder-fulness of the never-will-be and look past the whatever is, they make me feel…mundane…common. They tell me how the best of all lives would be. And I, grubbing for the roots of today, of the hows of how I got here, want to believe I am no more spoiled than I am; that I can recover, and move beyond who I am today.

Those self-proclaimed idealists, those pains in my reality, want to own idealism, want to look past today to a future which they proclaim as theirs, as if today is not happening, as if all the todays are not the future. And I, left gasping, want to know who will make this fantasy come to be, and why it is not time to begin: right here, right now!

The news this time is that, as Orwell depicted, the thinkers of the right have learned about the power of the idea of history, especially in its rewriting. It is, deeply in our psyches, the idea of how we got here which informs our thinking about each present moment. More importantly, it is the idea of how we got here which virtually makes the reality of experience continuous. Thus the notion of revision of history, its rewriting and recasting, has a powerful effect on how we consider where we are…that we are. The notion of history is of course, rewritten or recast often in various senses.

We effectively lose time in some aspects of our lives, concentrate on particular facts to the detriment of others, forget in some ways and cannot in certain others. But we rely on the belief that it did happen and is theoretically recapturable with the right witness or upon deep reflection or study. When the belief in history is lost, when we are not certain that we were, then the present becomes very negotiable, and charisma or some “fall into belief” becomes powerfully persuasive.

We use history, rather the belief in history, to tell ourselves where we are, who we are and are not, and what meaning is. The “right” whatever else may be, is conservative, is particularly invested in history psychologically, because the conservative mind decides early in life what it is, essentially, and compares each next day with that vision of who one is. When the conservative mind learns revisionism, what measure is there to judge, to measure, to decide?