A Quote by Jodi Picoult
History isn't about dates and places and wars. It's about the people who fill the spaces between them.
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The way they taught history in schools was not appealing. They stressed wars and dates. They left the people out. I was attracted to history by the need to know about the people. In China, I went to a British school, and we just learned about kings and queens. Back in America, I had the regular social studies curriculum.
There are still many large white spaces on the map of human knowledge. You can go discover them. So do it. Get out there and fill in the blank spaces. Every single moment is a possibility to go to these new places and explore them.
Sometimes it's about the economic situation and sometimes it's about the fear of others. Sometimes it's about protecting the generally accepted values. If you look at history, history is just a succession of people meeting other people, either through commerce, voyages or wars.
Spaces of liberation are, in a certain way, some kind of social spaces where people can not only get together and think about something else, but also act together. If you are thinking about an elemental solidarity, you are thinking about people acting together and taking decisions together, and thereby beginning to think about what sort of society they want to create. So, there is a need for liberated spaces; that is really difficult.
History is not just about dates and quotations. And it's not just about politics, the military and social issues, though much of it of course is about that. It's about everything. It's about life history. It's human. And we have to see it that way. We have to teach it that way. We have to read it that way. It's about art, music, literature, money, science, love - the human experience.
I was able to notice in a very early stage, there were discrepancies between the people who are writing the songs and discrepancies about the self that I was writing about. I was feeling that there were all these different people, both writing the record and having the record being written about them, even though ostensibly it was me sitting down and documenting a series of life experiences. Part of that, when I recognized this unconscious thing I was doing, was about these spaces, about these gaps.
We seem to know that international wars tend not to stop with their formal "peace treaties." We seem not to have thought enough about the difference between the large official events of political and military history and their overflow both into recognized effects and into the lives of unofficial people who suffer them.
Planets were very large places, on any scale but that of the spaces in between them.
Novels can fill in the spaces about what that emotional resonance is.
'Seconds' is all about spaces, and I guess spaces are kind of like people in that they can be haunting and alluring before we even really get to know them, and after prolonged exposure, they can become mundane or oppressive.
There are so many times and places in history in our world that I just don't know anything about, and when I learn about them they're always fascinating.
My platitudes don't hold their interest and I can hardly blame them for that. My real stories are all out of date. So what if I can speak firsthand about the Spanish flu, the advent of the automobile, world wars, cold wars, guerrilla wars, and Sputnik — that's all ancient history now. But what else do I have to offer? Nothing happens to me anymore. That's the reality of getting old, and I guess that's really the crux of the matter. I'm not ready to be old yet.
History doesn't mean dates and wars and textbooks to me; it means the unconquerable pioneer spirit of man.
Dates are convenient hooks on which we can hang our memories of events. But history is all about people - people like you and me who did things to change the world.
I talked to George Lucas once, not about Star Wars. Everyone wants to talk to him about Star Wars, and I didn't want to be one of those people. In person - at least on this occasion - he wasn't effervescent and giddy, as the Star Wars movies are. He's more focused.
I photograph in public and semi-public spaces that date from various epochs. These are spaces accessible to everyone. They are places where you can meet and communicate, where you can share or receive knowledge, where you can relax and recover. They are spas, hotels, waiting rooms, museums, libraries, universities, banks, churches and, as of a few years ago, zoos. All of the places have a purpose, as for the most part do the things within them.
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