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  • The Terror of History:An Interview with Teofilo F. Ruiz
  • Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

History is often experienced as an enormous burden. The weight of centuries of wars, poverty, and unspeakable human cruelty and suffering often mocks our efforts to discern patterns of human betterment in the past. Yet, as Teofilo Ruiz argues, we humans have "such an inexhaustible desire to make and have meaning." Ruiz's recently published The Terror of History (Princeton University Press, 2011) reflects on the various ways we confront and attempt to escape from the weight of history. Ruiz is Distinguished Professor of History and of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA. Senior editor Donald Yerxa interviewed Ruiz in November 2011.

Donald A. Yerxa:

What do you mean by the phrase "terror of history"?

Teofilo F. Ruiz:

The terror of history refers to the wars, genocides, and inequality that have been prevalent through human history. Walter Benjamin wrote that there are no monuments of civilization that are not at the same time monuments of barbarity. In many respects this is right. Some of the greatest epochs in human history are filled with these contradictions. Take the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution: they were paralleled by the massacre of almost 100,000 people, mostly elderly women, accused of witchcraft. Think of all the technological advances of the 20th century, and then think of the horrible wars and genocides perpetrated throughout the century.

Yerxa:

Is it fair to say that your book is as much a commentary on the march of time and the existential dread that it produces as it is an analysis of the tragic aspects of human history?

Ruiz:

I hope it is both and that I have engaged in a reflection on history; what it means; how we make meaning out of catastrophes, both personal and collective.

Yerxa:

How does Goya's disturbing Saturn Devouring One of His Children, reproduced on your book's jacket, illustrate your theme?

Ruiz:

The image is almost a coda for some of my points. It is not history but also time that we attempt to freeze, to make meaning of. Saturn is the old god Cronos, that is, Time. Time devours us all. The book ends with a reference to James Thompson's devastating poem "The City of the Dreadful Night" and with an anonymous Nahuatl poem. Both discuss the ephemeral nature of human life.

Yerxa:

The bulk of your book consists of commentary on the palliative responses to the terror of history—that of the mystic, the hedonist, and the aesthete. Would you speak briefly to these three attempts to escape history and keep its terrors outside our doors?


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Ruiz:

Religion, by shifting all agency to god, provides a rationale for the most abominable deeds of humans against other humans. Sensual pursuits provide momentary release from the pressures of history and time. Although short-lived, these intense experiences—sexual, gustatory, physical—offer respite from the unrelenting march of time and the accumulation of catastrophes. Aestheticizing the world, if I may express it in such fashion, also allows us, in the moment of creation, to escape everyday routines by a sense of attaining beauty or knowledge. This may be as much of an escape as the other two, but it is, at least for me, more satisfying.

Yerxa:

The Greeks, as you well know, had two words for time: chronos and kairos. The former describes sequential, linear time. This is the stuff of Goya's painting. But the latter refers to those moments of indeterminate or even metaphysical time in which something special happens,as in "time well spent." Your book powerfully focuses on chronos , but what about kairos? Is this just an illusion of the mystic?

Ruiz:

I have been accused of being too pessimistic, but I also understand and believe in kairos or in "time well spent." I think that if people read carefully my conclusions, they will have a sense that, in spite of all the awful things that have happened throughout history or that may happen to individuals, there is something redemptive in those special moments—whether triggered by religion, beauty, or pleasure—that make life...

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