Possession

I recently finished reading Possession by A.S. Byatt. I think Byatt is a great writer and I liked the book more than I wish I had, given that one of the main characters was kind of a weasel who I was almost convinced to approve of. One thing that I found really interesting in the book was the view of history it presented. It really made me think about history's place in society and in my personal life. It follows two English scholars as they research the lives of two Victorian poets who apparently had an affair that no one had ever known about. I got really caught up in the book and was so excited while I was telling my husband what it was about. Being a science major, his response was, "So what? Who cares what these dead poets did?" Got to admit, I hadn't really thought of it that way. And even as I kept reading, eagerly waiting to find out "what happens," I did find myself wondering why it mattered. In my head, I kept going back and forth between thoughts like, "It was their personal life; who cares?" and "But it changes everything! All their poems will have different meanings than everyone thought!" back to "Buuuuuuut . . . so what? They're just poems and no one can ever really say what they mean anyway."

It made me wonder what the importance of history is . . . I mean, if any new discovery about historical "facts" is made, it could change the meaning we've placed on our lives. Like in Possession, imagine you had spent your entire adult life studying another person's life, if you thought you knew everything there was to know about this person, and in an instant it all changed. Turns out, all your studying and all your knowledge means next to nothing because there was something you didn't know that changes everything else. All the connections you've made, the interpretations you've created, and the meaning you've drawn from your work is obsolete because something new turns up that alters everything.

So maybe you would never spend time studying someone's life like that . . . but what if it had been, say, an ancestor of yours that had some dark secret in their past you didn't know about? Or a secret in our nation's history? Or even a friend who you would think about completely differently if you knew something that they are keeping from you? I think the main impact Possession had on me was to make me wonder how much is out there that I don't know about and how my life would change if some new discovery were made about the things I believe in most.