08/10/2022
The Art of Perseverance
In the history of historiography and historical narratives, no team of historians had unearthed a monumental empire that had lasted a thousand years, and that was spread across a million miles, from under the windswept deposits of the ages like this one singular man. He, with his melancholic passion, word by word, vividly conjured up, from the sooty and rooted remains, the vanished majesty that once was the Roman Empire in seven arresting volumes. What makes his feat even more astounding is the fact that he wasn’t formally trained for it. He was not a historian, but a lonely and forlorn traveler smitten by the inexorable power of the ruins of Rome, that peered from under mounds of debris like gold, waiting for that right cajoler.
We celebrate such individuals as Gibbon that possess the temerity to not think of failure but know that failure is not trying at all. Here’s how he puts it: “Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.” And we resolve to honor those to keep trying and trying.
