Meditações - making the ending — the present — seem the inevitable outcome of the past

"History is just one damned thing after another.” That pithy summary was supposedly coined by Arnold Toynbee, but, as Frans van Lunteren points out, “every story needs a plot.” Faced with these contradictory constraints, historians who wish to do more than simply chronicle a succession of events are forced to impose story lines retrospectively. This can have the unfortunate effect of making the ending  — the present — seem the inevitable outcome of the past.

Patrícia Fara