Zachary Sayre SCHIFFMAN. The Birth of the Past

Like Edward Gibbon, Zachary Sayre Schiffman traces the first insight into his life's work to an earlier epiphany. Paralleling Gibbon's musings in the Capitol in Rome during the singing of vespers is Schiffman's “crossing a quadrangle at the University of Chicago somewhere around Botany Pond,” except that, unlike Gibbon, Schiffman introduces his book with the memory instead of relegating it to his memoirs. Here it was that he began to conceive of his target not as the practice of writing history but as the concept of “The Past” (“our accustomed mode of thinking”), which Schiffman defines as an abstract idea that only we moderns (since the Renaissance) utilize. The key to this argument is the idea of anachronism and the related view that the past is actually different from the present. Schiffman continues with an almost scholastic argument based on a very selective array of texts (and secondary authorities), not always historical and interpreted according to the initial theoretical apparatus.

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