NARRATIVE HISTORY AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Henry Thomas Buckle
1821 November 24, Saturday: Henry Thomas Buckle was born at Lee in Kent, a son of the wealthy London merchant and shipowner Thomas Henry Buckle. Delicate health would prevent him from obtaining much in the way of formal education. However, at an early age he would win renown as a chess player. By the time he was 20 he would be regarded as one of the best in the world. According to one record, on this day Dr. Josiah Bartlett of Concord got married with Martha Tilden Bradford of Waltham (according to another record, the wedding took place on January 22, 1822 at the home of the Reverend Ripley). NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT Henry Thomas Buckle Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project
1840 January: Thomas Henry Buckle, the father of Henry Thomas Buckle, died. The son would accompany his widowed mother on an extended visit to Europe. DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD. Henry Thomas Buckle Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project
1841 At the age of 20, Henry Thomas Buckle was recognized as one of the best chess players in the world.
1844 Back in England from his and his mother s extended travels in Europe, Henry Thomas Buckle was resolved that he was going to devote his life to the preparation of a great synthesis of the parameters of human life under conditions of civilization. This would preoccupy him totally for the following 17 years and would eventuate in 1857 s HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IN ENGLAND, Volume I (of which Henry Thoreau would purchase the edition prepared by D. Appleton and company of New York in 1859, taking notes in his Indian Notebook #11), followed by 1861 s Volume II. LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? NO, THAT S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN S STORIES. LIFE ISN T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD. Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Henry Thomas Buckle
1851 Initially, Henry Thomas Buckle had supposed that his work in history would be cast as a history of the Middle Ages. By this point, however, it was clear that what he was embarked upon was more general than that, a history of human civilization.
1857 June: Henry Thomas Buckle released the initial volume of his grand synthesis of the history of human civilization, entitled HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IN ENGLAND, Volume I. 2D EDITION, OF 1862 CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT Henry Thomas Buckle Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project
1858 An American edition of Henry Thomas Buckle s HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IN ENGLAND, Volume I was prepared in New-York by D. Appleton and company. 2D EDITION, OF 1862 This is the edition from which Henry Thoreau would make notes in his Indian Notebook #11. March 19, Friday: Henry Thomas Buckle s lecture at the Royal Institution, Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge. In her journal for this month, Louisa May Alcott referred to having purchased the Alcott family plot in Concord s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. (Knowing that Lizzie was dying, the family would have made arrangements, most likely with Emerson s help. The only one who s not there in the family plot now is May Alcott (Mrs. Ernest Niericker), who would die abroad and be placed in a rented grave in Paris. Although Louisa would arrange for a stone in the family plot in Sleepy Hollow and make plans to have her body brought home, with her death the rental payments would lapse and May s remains would be moved to a mass grave.) Louisa s letter to Eliza Wells on this day indicated that her sister Elizabeth Sewall Alcott had been buried there after her funeral service had been read by the Reverend Dr. Frederic Huntington. Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, and Franklin Benjamin Sanborn had been among the pallbearers. March 19. P.M. To Hill and Grackle Swamp. Another pleasant and warm day. Painted my boat this afternoon. These spring impressions (as of the apparent waking up of the meadow described day before yesterday) are not repeated the same year, at least not with the same force, for the next day the same phenomenon does not surprise us. Our appetite has lost its edge. The other day the face of the meadow wore a peculiar appearance, as if it were beginning to wake up under the influence of the southwest wind and the warm sun, but it cannot again this year present precisely that appearance to me. I have taken a step forward to a new position and must see something else. You perceive, and are affected by, changes too subtle to be described. I see little swarms of those fine fuzzy gnats in the air. I am behind the Hemlocks. It is their wings which are most conspicuous, when they are in the sun. Their bodies are comparatively small and black, and they have two
mourning plumes in their fronts. Are not these the winter gnat? They keep up a circulation in the air like waterbugs on the water. They people a portion of the otherwise vacant air, being apparently fond of the sunshine, in which they are most conspicuous. Sometimes a globular swarm two feet or more in diameter, suggesting how genial and habitable the air is become. I hear turkeys gobble. This too, I suppose, is a spring sound. I hear a steady sigh of the wind, rising and swelling into a roar, in the pines, which seems to tell of a long, warm rain to come. I see a white pine which has borne fruit in its ninth year. The cones, four in number, which are seven eighths of an inch long, have stems about two and a half inches long! not yet curving down; so the stem probably does not grow any more. Met Channing and walked on with him to what we will call Grackle Swamp, admiring the mosses; those brightyellow hypnums (?), like sunlight on decaying logs, and jungermannia, like sea-mosses ready spread. Hear the phebe note of a chickadee. In the swamp, see grackles, four or five, with the light ring about eye, their bead eyes. They utter only those ineffectual split notes, no conqueree. Might I not call that Hemlock Brook? and the source of it Horse-Skull meadow? Hear the pleasant chill-lill of the F. hyemalis, the first time I have heard this note. This, too, suggests pleasant associations. By the river, see distinctly red-wings [Red-winged Blackbird Agelaius phoeniceus] and hear their conqueree. They are not associated with grackles. They are an age before their cousins, have attained to clearness and liquidity. They are officers, epauletted; the others are rank and file. I distinguish one even by its flight, hovering slowly from tree-top to tree-top, as if ready to utter its liquid notes. Their whistle is very clear and sharp, while the grackle s is ragged and split. It is a fine evening, as I stand on the bridge. The waters are quite smooth; very little ice to be seen. The red-wing and song sparrow are singing, and a flock of tree sparrows is pleasantly warbling. A new era has come. The redwing s gurgle-ee is heard when smooth waters begin; they come together. One or two boys are out trying their skiffs, even like the fuzzy gnats in the sun, and as often as one turns his boat round on the smooth surface, the setting sun is reflected from its side. I feel reproach when I have spoken with levity, when I have made a jest, of my own existence. The makers have thus secured seriousness and respect for their work in our very organization. The most serious events have their ludicrous aspect, such as death; but we cannot excuse ourselves when we have taken this view of them only. It is pardonable when we spurn the proprieties, even the sanctities, making them stepping-stones to something higher. April: Henry Thomas Buckle s Influence of Women on the Progress of Knowledge appeared in Fraser s Magazine. WHAT I M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF Henry Thomas Buckle Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project
1859 April 1, Friday: Henry Thomas Buckle s mother died. He would conclude a review of John Stuart Mill s ESSAY ON LIBERTY, for Fraser s Magazine, by observing that he needed to have faith that death was not final because without this it would not be possible for him to go on. April 1. Some have planted peas and lettuce. Melvin, the sexton, says that when Loring s Pond was drained once perhaps the dam broke he saw there about all the birds he has seen on a salt marsh. Also that he once shot a mackerel gull in Concord, I think he said it was in May; that he sees the two kinds of yellow-legs here; that he has shot at least two kinds of large gray ducks, as big (one, at least) as black ducks. He says that one winter (it may have been the last) there were caught by him and others at one place in the river below Ball s Hill, in sight of Carlisle Bridge, about two hundred pounds of pickerel within a week, something quite unprecedented, at least of late years. This was about the last of February or first of March. No males were caught! and he thinks that they had collected there in order to spawn. Perhaps perch and pickerel collect in large numbers for this purpose. P. M. To Assabet over meadows in boat; a very strong and a cold northwest wind. I land again at the (now island) rock, on Simon Brown s land, and look for arrowheads, and picked [sic] up two pieces of soapstone pottery. One was probably part of the same which C. found with me there the other day. C. s piece was one side of a shallow dish, say an inch and a half deep, four eighths to six eighths of an inch thick, with a sort of ear for handle on one side. almost a leg. His piece, like mine, looks as if it had been scratched all over on the outside by a nail, and it is evident that this is the way it was fashioned. It was scratched with some hard, sharp-pointed stone and so crumbled and worn away. This little knoll was half plowed (through its summit) last fall in order to be cultivated this spring, and the high water standing over all but the apex has for a fortnight been faithfully washing away the soil and leaving the stones Indian relics and others exposed. The very roots of the grass, yellowish-brown fibres, are thus washed clean and exposed in considerable quantity there. You could hardly have contrived a better way to separate the arrowheads that lay buried in that sod between the rocks from the sod and soil. At the Pokelogan up the Assabet, I see my first phœbe, the mild bird. It flirts its tail and sings pre vit, pre vit, pre vit, pre vit incessantly, as it sits over the water, and then at last, rising on the last syllable, says pre-vee, as if insisting on that with peculiar emphasis. The villagers remark how dark and angry the water looks to-day. I think it is because it is a clear and very windy day and the high waves cast much shadow. Crow blackbirds common.
1861 May: Henry Thomas Buckle issued the 2d volume of his grand synthesis of the history of human civilization, HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IN ENGLAND, Volume II (we may well presume that Thoreau never saw this collection of whiggish attitudes, despite the fact that there would be an American edition). Soon the author would leave England, traveling for his health. 2D EDITION, OF 1887 These two volumes describe this author s creation of a positivistic science of history. He had uncovered principles and laws in the trajectories to date of Spain, Scotland, the United States, and Germany. His description of these general historical regularities which he had so far uncovered, laws which had governed the character and destiny of these nations and the course of human progress to date, were: While the theological dogma of predestination is a barren hypothesis beyond the province of knowledge, and the metaphysical dogma of free will rests on an erroneous belief in the infallibility of consciousness, it is proved by science, and especially by the science of statistics, that human actions are governed by laws as fixed and regular as those which rule in the physical world. The primary causes of intellectual progress are climate, soil, food, and the aspects of nature climate, soil, and food indirectly, through determining the accumulation and distribution of wealth, and the aspects of nature by directly influencing the accumulation and distribution of thought, the imagination being stimulated and the understanding subdued when the phenomena of the external world are sublime and terrible, the understanding being emboldened and the imagination curbed when they are small and feeble. The big distinction to be made between European and non-european civilization is that while Europeans have subdued nature to their service, elsewhere nature remains in control. European civilization advances by overcoming physical laws and improving the sway of mental laws. The mental laws which regulate the progress of society are not discoverable through metaphysical, introspective, armchair study of the individual mind; such discoveries come through comprehensive surveys of facts, using a method of averages that eliminates meaningless fluctuations.
Human progress has not come about by moral agencies, which are stationary and balance one another in such a manner that their influence is unfelt over any long period, but through intellectual activity, which has been constantly varying and advancing: The actions of individuals are greatly affected by their moral feelings and passions; but these being antagonistic to the passions and feelings of other individuals, are balanced by them, so that their effect is, in the great average of human affairs, nowhere to be seen, and the total actions of mankind, considered as a whole, are left to be regulated by the total knowledge of which mankind is possessed. Individual efforts are insignificant in the great mass of human affairs, and great men, although they exist, and must at present be looked upon as disturbing forces, are merely the creatures of the age to which they belong. Religion, literature and government are, at best, products rather than causes of civilization. Civilization progresses by means of scepticism (the disposition to question and investigate) and is retarded by credulity and the protective spirit (the disposition to avoid critical examination of established beliefs and practices). THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT Winter: Henry Thomas Buckle was in Egypt. From there he would traverse the deserts of Sinai and of Edom to Syria, arriving eventually at Jerusalem. Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Henry Thomas Buckle
1862 April 19, Saturday: As part of the US Civil War, people were killing each other at South Mills / Camden. Having traversed the deserts of Sinai and of Edom on his way from Egypt into Syria, on this day Henry Thomas Buckle arrived at Jerusalem. Meanwhile, the USS Constellation was proceeding from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean. Here is a painting, by DeSimone, of this vessel, anchored in Naples harbor during this year: (This vessel was to assist in blockading the CSS Sumter in the port at Gibraltar.) This was the day of Compensated Emancipation in the nation s capital, Washington DC. Slaveowners there, since they were influential people, would receive cash money from the federal government, and their slaves
would be manumitted. THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT April 30, Wednesday: Henry Thomas Buckle set out from Jerusalem toward Beirut, intending to embark there for Europe. When he would reach Nazareth, however, he would be attacked by fever, and would need to head for Damascus for medical treatment. At Gibraltar, United States Yeoman Safford of the USS Constellation commented of a Confederate vessel that The Spanish regard the Sunpter [sic] as a pirate, and would seize her as such in their own ports, but the British are more partial in their attitude toward her. May 29, Friday: Henry Thomas Buckle died in Damascus. Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Henry Thomas Buckle
MAGISTERIAL HISTORY IS FANTASIZING, HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this read-only computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2014. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace resulting in navigation problems allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. It s all now you see. Yesterday won t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. Remark by character Garin Stevens in William Faulkner s INTRUDER IN THE DUST Prepared: May 10, 2014 Stack of the Artist of Kouroo Project Henry Thomas Buckle
ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT GENERATION HOTLINE This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot Laura (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.
Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary writerly process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world. First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with <Kouroo@kouroo.info>. Arrgh.