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IN order to narrate and organise the past in a systematic manner, a discipline emerged that came to be known as history. Once constituted as an academic subject, it acquired a curriculum, textbooks, pedagogical methods, and institutional structures. Yet a fundamental question remains: what exactly is the nature of the past? The past is not a physical territory that can be surveyed, measured, enclosed, and assigned an owner. Nor is it an object that can be fully quantified and catalogued.
One may collect water in a bucket, store it in a tank, or even contain it within a reservoir. But what of a river? Can that which is perpetually flowing ever truly be possessed? How can ownership be established over something whose very essence lies in movement? Ideas are like flowing water, and so too is the past. One way of imagining the past is as the sky itself. If that metaphor appears excessive, then let us think of it as an ocean. Even if modern technology allows us to calculate its dimensions, what of its depths, its mysteries, and the vast biological and non-biological worlds that inhabit it? Can these be completely measured?
And even if some divine power made such total measurement possible, would that necessarily be desirable? Would it not be preferable instead to cultivate a comprehensive intellectual sensibility that enables us to revisit the past from ever-new perspectives? Human beings approach reality through multiple modes of understanding. Alongside the poetic and philosophical stand religious, scientific, and historical perspectives, each possessing its own assumptions, methods, and limitations. To bind the past, to measure it exhaustively, or to claim proprietary authority over it — such ambitions appear fundamentally misguided. There are, and ought to be, multiple ways of understanding the past.
