Unassailable

I live in a building in East London designed after the plan of Jerusalem in the first century AD. To get to my flat, you need to neutralise three gates. To take Jerusalem, the Romans attacking in the early 70s also had to conquer three sets of walls. An impregnable fortress which turned out pregnable in the end.

It is one of the greatest ironies of history that nearly all human projects claiming to be undying, untakeable, unsinkable, have a particularly short life span. The three thousand year Reich lasted for not more than a couple of decades. The steamer that not even God could sink went down in less than 3 hours. Too many Troys, Romes and Jerusalems were taken more quickly than those who proclaimed them immortal had time to readjust their views.

It is the condition of the historian to always gaze over the burning city from the heights of hindsight. No history is written from the street, except that which doesn’t really make sense until after it has moved to the said heights. Only from a distance and from the air is anything intelligible.

To understand is to look back and to look down. It is to pause and take notice. It is to stop and ponder. Only once the fog has lifted can we see the ruins and hear the stories they tell. The voices of the survivors are heard once the dust has settled and the bombing has ceased. The unbearable silence of undoing.