John Lambshead > Quotes

“We cannot ever know the past for certain because it no longer exists. All we have is the information to be collected from the endless now, and our interpretation of that data. Then we begin to weave stories to link our interpretations into a coherent narrative rather like the sketching games in children’s play books where a pencil line is drawn from number to number to reveal an image. The poetic might like to draw an analogy of seeing pictures in clouds. Asking whether that narrative is ‘true’ in some absolute sense is pointless. Only priests and politicians claim to know truth. Humble academics know they are ‘interpolating’.”
― John Lambshead, The Fall of Roman Britain: and Why We Speak English