We need open minds and open hearts when we wrestle with the past and ask questions of it, and the answers it will provide are in nobody's pocket... We should let nobody tell us that they know all that it contains, or try to prescribe or constrain in advance what it has to tell us.

Symbolic rearrangement of the past is of course an unavoidable aspect of all human attempts to make sense of the present.

If history offers no obvious solutions, however, it does at least provide the comfort of knowing that failure is nothing new.

We need open minds and open hearts when we wrestle with the past and ask questions of it, and the answers it will provide are in nobody's pocket... We should let nobody tell us that they know all that it contains, or try to prescribe or constrain in advance what it has to tell us.

History is tangled, messy, contradictory. But is where we are.