“In the middle of an exacting history course, it takes a high degree of moral courage to resist one’s own conscience to take time off; to let the imagination run; to give serious attention to reading books that widen our sympathies, that train us to imagine with greater precision what it is like to be human in situations very different from our own.

“It is essential to take that risk. For a history course to be content to turn out well-trained minds and deeper sympathies would be a mutilation of the intellectual inheritance of our own culture, of an element of imaginative curiosity about others whose removal may be more deleterious than we would like to think to the subtle and ever-precarious ecology on which a liberal western tradition of respect for others is based.”

Brown, Peter, SOCIETY AND THE HOLY IN LATE ANTIQUITY, p. 4.

This grand three-sentence, two paragraph statement somewhat expresses the point. I found it of interest and read on in this book. There was something wrong with the writing, though, and I remembered that this book was a collection of the author’s lectures. Apparently, nothing had been edited to remove the oral-nature of the lectures. Reading became problematic especially when the author did not develop the point, mentioning it as though it was an advertising teaser in a commercial. So I stopped reading.

Fortunately, I have been reading Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. That book is told in narration, by one man to another about what happened to a subordinate office of a ship who abandoned it with all the ship’s crew, while leaving all the Muslim pilgrims aboard a sinking ship. LORD JIM is not always easy to read. Passages and paragraphs can run two pages, and sentences… The narrative style of telling anything can make the story difficult and the writing impossible. Conrad writes Lord Jim about as well as can be done, using that voice.

Yet, this is exactly what the problem historian, Peter Brown, faces in his collection of lectures. In an exacting history, no historian writes, “Once again…” and that sort of parenthetical is littered in the pages of Brown’s book I read, 30-40 pages. I quit. I have read books that develop the passage, above, from page 4, and upon reading it, I hoped Brown would give greater and deeper analyses. Nope.