“You’ve evolved an entire system around this figure, a structure with countless substructures and interrelated field of study, a history within history.”
"I've got death inside me. It's just a question of whether or not I can outlive it."
From these quotes and from reading White Noise I have found Jack Gladney's view on history to be a mesh of several people's theories that we have discovered and analyzied this semester, including Hegelian, but mostly I thought that his ideas and beliefs were something totally new and more close to my own perspective on history which I found very interesting. Not so often this semester have brought up the idea that history and the people who have shaped and made it throughout the years, were effected by their own lives and that they are just people like all of us. Jack brings up the idea that Hitler should be thought of as just a man, who did very bad things, not this iconic figure in World History who was an evil force all mighty and powerful. Often forgotten are ideas about the countless "histories within histories" that exist around every person, every system and every substructure that is formed throughout history and the writings about history. By taking the ideas back to Hitler and his mother it makes him into a man, we all know many men who have had relationships with their m/others that effect the decisions they make in life and the mindsets that they have, positive or negative. There is more to a story than just the events of history that are most notorized, and so much of those stories are never heard of or taken into account. In the first quote that I have listed, Jack brings the idea into place about "Man's guilt in history and the tides of his own blood" to me this is saying that some of the things that are done in history, more than many people have considered ,have been effected in some way by the personal histories and family patterns, or intimacy dances that have occurred throughout one's personal life or family history, or what happens to be a make up of their blood or family ideologies and traditions. However drastic or not, the ultimate effects and actions may be from a person, you can usually tie something back to their personal history or family life.
The last quote that I noted did not really have much to do with this same idea that I am pointing out but it struck a cord with me and really stuck out. We all do have death inside of us, death is in each and everyone of our futures, this is taken in the literal sense. To ask the question of whether or not one will out live it says to me that by agreeing with what everyone else has to say, taking things for face value or ending our own personal search and discovery for what things are, what they were or what they could be to add to our personal knowledge is allowing our minds and souls to die. By not continuing to always search for something more or to not be a sheep and figure out a different answer for ourselves, one that may be real, such as digging into Hitler as a man instead of the figure that history has made him, is one of these ideas that one can search into to find a new answer.
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