Stories and Histories

"History in my thinking, as with some of my professional colleagues, is something in the making and it was Max Weber who, with great insight, mentioned the tentativeness of historical knowledge and hence its vulnerability. In this scheme of things, there is no soul or a fixed entity of a changeless Self that passes through time. As a soulless being and someone born and raised as a Buddhist, I find that an attractive proposition to live by. And so would I think some European thinkers who heralded the on-coming twentieth century, notable such persons as Ludwig Wittgenstein and his critic Bertrand Russell. So also with many fated to live in our own times wherein ancient knowledge has become time-worn, or shall I say with Thomas Hardy "time-torn", affirming with the great poet that we are all time-torn beings whether we are fated to ignore or by-pass that often unpalatable truth, a truth that some of us have been nurtured in irrespective of our formal religious affiliations." - Gananath Obeysekere