Unfinished truths

I've always said here about the past, my past, past the place where I lived, the past of mankind.

I also said that perhaps only the History, as organized science and with its own methods, is capable of allowing us to organize our ideas and our mass of information and record everything to the world, if we wish so.

But beyond History as a science, there is the History as a collection of narrated facts. They are exactly the historical facts that are the object of study by History as a science.

So I sought some help in both stories. And they have generated more questions than certainties. Let's see.

I sought a book called "What is History?", by a  renowned British historian Edward Hallet Carr. But it is not easy. There is much doubt about what is a historical fact, and the questions are multiple.

Also sought an Atlas of Human History. He begins not with History but with the Pre-History. Mankind existed long before written records on which is based on the traditional History. Our past is written in the rocks, the fossils, the bones, in the unfathomable.

Thus, the methods of the science of History is not encouraged me to go deeper into the question, because I am not a historian, although the subject is fascinating, and the facts of prehistory (because we humans are shaped by an accumulation of facts which go back thousands, millions of years) did not allow me to go beyond what already had some notion, that we are descendants of a series of common ancestors, etc.., because I am not an anthropologist.

Our past is not a lie. He is a unfinished truth.

Edward Hallet Carr died without completing a second edition of his important book. Much of the introduction of the issue at hand should have a commentator who is responsible for ensuring the intellectual legacy of Carr, who left only to this second edition a pile of boxes of clippings and notes and drafts that leads to the conclusion that much more could still be said, improved and enhanced on the theme of History as science, which is not surprising, but that a person's life, however much alive, is still too small to play forward even relatively small projects, such as a second edition of a book.

And today I read an article about anthropology, actually one of many that are advertised week after week, about a new discovery, a new fossil, a new dental arch, a new subspecies, finally, one more link in the chain of ancestors lost in time and in the rocks around the world. Our history as a specie is still an unfinished truth.

It is also my life a unfinished truth? I do not know, but I have to understand this business of "unfinished truth."