Toni Morrison is one of the most influential thinkers on the vitality of history that I have encountered. She is a strong believer that we all must develop an understanding of history. In fact, Morrison goes beyond the call for an understanding of history. In a video taped interview we watched in class, she argues that we need to embrace history and develop a friendship with it. This philosophy can only come out of a deeply held belief in the value and relevancy of history.

When Morrison talks about history she means not only the history of our country, but most importantly that history which has a personal impact on our lives. In this way, her history evolves into the story of her family. The lines between the history of textbooks and that of family stories begin to blur. When we read history, we learn the facts. Morrison is urging us to go beyond that and integrate our knowledge of how the events affected our family into the larger framework. She is calling for a personalization of the historical data. If we search for the meaning and the relevancy, then what we learn will develop a significance.

Morrison further urges us to embrace history and have a fond relationship with it. This seems to be a strange position for an author whose history is dominated by the dark saga of slavery. It would seem only natural for her to want to forget the past and start a new history. Morrison's prompting can therefore be seen only as further recognition that no matter what we try to do, the history that we have will affect our lives. It would have done Art no good to have ignored the Holocaust; his life was already determined to a large extent by it whether he acknowledged that or not. Likewise, ignorance of the exact details of Sethe’s actions did not shield Denver from the impact of Sethe's choice. Moreover, it is only when Denver develops a cohesive knowledge of what the full story is that she is able to improve her life.

Morrison lets us know that history is who we are and that to ignore it does not diminish its impact. Moreover, we need to embrace history as reflective of who we are and understand what meaning that has for each of our lives.

In her web project, Grace Slattery says "nothing ever dies if there is a memory of it". If we take what Grace has to say one step further, with the new knowledge that nothing can be forgotten, we can explain how it is she arrives at the conclusion that time is circular. Even if every single person were to forget an event, it could not slip away because it lives on in its effects on the present. Nobody might consciously trace the something in the present back to the point in history, but the effect is there nonetheless. I don't think Grace wants to argue that time is circular, but rather that it is a contiuous flow. Often, we try to deliniate things by days and hours, but in reality all of history is one continuous story that continues into the present. All of time is not circular, it is a weblike pattern as Silko describes it when she describes Tayo by saying, "He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distance and time" (Silko 246). We try to delineate history, but that only leas to confusion. It is all one web of connections and relationships that would be truly impossible to sort out.

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