History is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.

Garth Greenwell
About This Quote

History is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way. History is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way. In the quote above, the author, John Berger, is trying to convey the difficulties of history without the voice to give the reader a sense of what history is. He does this by using a metaphor. He compares history to a river that flows through the lives of all people at different times and that carries them along. History carries us along as it moves from one life to another.

We may not see the river as we flow through it but we do notice its speed and its direction as we reach for our destination. It isn’t until we reach our destination that we notice how fast we have been carried along or how long we have been gone from our original point. When we don’t know what happened before or how we arrived at where we stand today then our history is invisible and we can say that history does not abet our sense of self because we can’t tell ourselves who we are and where we came from.

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