An Intimate History of Humanity

"I think this book is a watershed in the writing of human history. It is an exploration of the history of emotions, and the way that they relate to everyday life today. Zeldin helps us to understand the big picture that who we are – the way we think about love, fear, death and so on – is partly inherited from the past. The way we think about love is inherited from medieval ideas of courtly love, for instance. We’re products of the past. This was a revolutionary idea, to personalise history and make it relevant – and it inspired my own book The Wonderbox . So Zeldin connects the past with the present, for me like no other historical writer. He’s chosen what he thinks are the 24 most important aspects of emotional life – like love, fear, hate or curiosity – and has dedicated a chapter to each one. He starts each chapter by interviewing someone (in the case of this book a French woman) and then traces how that person’s quandaries in life are reflected in the past. What he leads up to is a core conclusion that conversation, and nurturing the art of conversation, is one of the ways to transform our lives in a mental way. Not only. One of the ways that we nurture empathy is through conversation, yes. Of course you can nurture empathy through experience as well, like George Orwell did. But conversation is important for other areas of life too, for example the way in which we think about death. We live in a culture that barely talks about death, compared to a few hundred years ago. It’s as taboo a subject today as talking about sex was in the Victorian era. Yet we need to nurture the way in which we talk about death if we’re going to have serious conversations in society about issues like euthanasia or Alzheimer’s, or deal with our dilemmas of nursing home culture. We need to learn to talk about death as much as we need to talk about life. One of the discoveries I made in writing The Wonderbox is that in the past people in Western culture were so much closer to death than we are today. That’s partly because mortality rates were much higher – people were dying in their thirties on average until the early Victorian period. So in public culture death was much more around, particularly in the Middle Ages. Children played in cemeteries. People wore death’s head brooches and skull necklaces – memento mori . There were frescos on the walls of the dance of death, with skeletons leading people away to their graves. And many historians stress how when death culture was much more around us, that’s when we lived life with the greatest passion. I think what we need to do today, by developing a more healthy way to talk about death, is to bring death closer to our lives without it making us more fearful of it, so we realise that life is short, that it’s fragile, that it’s precious. I would like every Sunday newspaper to have not just a lifestyle section but a deathstyle section. That is one of my favourite quotes, and is highlighted in my copy of Walden which sits beside my desk. Thoreau understood that we don’t need to waste our time by turning shopping into our favourite leisure activity, or spending three hours a day watching television. By staring the essentials of life in the face, by trying to understand who we are, by engaging with nature, by expanding our creativity and our minds, by using our hands – these are ways in which we can live deeply and, as he said, suck all the marrow out of life. Well, one could sit down and read these five books to begin with. That may give one a certain kind of inspiration. But what really comes out of these books, I think, is to treat life as an experiment. To take chances. To say things you’ve never said before, and to do things you’ve never done before. On some level every culture has come up with the idea that we need to seize the day – carpe diem . As the idea in Judaic thought goes: If not now, when? We need to recognise that life is preciously short and now is the moment to make that change – whether it is talking to your sister whom you haven’t spoken to in a decade, or handing in your resignation letter, or starting a community puppet theatre whether it works or not. Ultimately, if we don’t take those chances, and if we don’t sometimes fall down as well as stand up and thrive, we’re never going to live a life which is both deep and adventurous."