REPAIR

“In history, unlike heredity, we choose our ancestors. We choose with monuments, markers and history books. We choose also with bulldozers, by what we remove.”

“Certainly history is important, we say. Children should know history, we say. History is not a flea market or what I throw out today, history is the textbook stuff, history is…important.” ”¦Howard Mansfield “In the Memory House.”

BY ELIZABETH V. SPELMAN

“The Human Being is a repairing animal. Repair is ubiquitous, something we engage in every day and in almost every dimension of our lives. Homo sapiens is also Homo reparans.

Perhaps the most obvious kinds of repair are those having to do with the inanimate objects with which we surround ourselves–the clothes calling out for mending, the automobiles for fixing, the buildings for renovating, the works of art for restoring. But our bodies and souls also are by their very nature subject to fracture and fissure, for which we seek homely recipes for healing and consolation, or perhaps the expert ministrations of surgeons, therapists, and other menders and fixers of all manner of human woes. Relationships between individuals and among nations are notoriously subject to fraying and being rent asunder. From apologies and other informal attempts at patching thins up to law courts, conflict mediation, and truth and reconciliation commissions, we try to reweave what we revealingly call the social fabric.… Read the rest “REPAIR”