Antiquity

It is said that Boston is the Athens of America. Academic groves aside, this always seemed to me a spurious comparison--a tourist attraction at best, at worst an elaborate artifice on the order of the Pergamon or the Memphis acropolis.

But I reconsidered on a Tuesday in mid-May when I walked out of Widener into the space framed by two large columns, the Yard spread before me, the worn marble steps littered with photographers--and then, nearly twenty-four hours later, traced an oddly familiar descent from the colonnade at the Acropolis, prose in hand, with the magnificent view of Athens (and of flocks of photographers) stretching from marble's edge to the shore.

This stands, however, only as a subjective (and shortly, sentimental) judgment. The smooth columns of Widener and the short descent to the Tercentenary Theater need not universally recall the tongue-and-grooved columns at the Acropolis' entrance, a good 10 minutes' walk from level ground. Roofed Pusey's no Parthenon, and Harvard Square--for all its memorabilia--hardly Plaka; and the comparative praises of higher learning have already been sung. So I will risk the addition of hyperbole to say that the Athens of Greece and America are responsible for my working notion of history.

I grew up in Chicago, whose history revolves around the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

The fire--attributed to Mrs. O'Leary's ill-fated cow knocking over a lantern on an October night--leveled most of the city, with the notable exception of a water tower. History in such a context (certainly not for all residents of Chicago, a city whose South Side is home to an extraordinary number of eminent historians and classicists; but for myself on the North Side, surrounded by construction, at a tender age) is the distance covered since the last beginning. It has no real sense of accumulation.

History, put otherwise, happened extensively in other parts of the world; but in the Midwest it hadn't seemed to stick. If adventurous grade-school teachers took us back before the era of the fire it was to tales of the area's indigenous peoples, the Miami of the north and the Illiniwek of the south. Read through the problematic cipher of fifth-grade pedagogy this was hardly history; instead of forging some kind of connection with the past, it served to set the stage on and against which the future was peremptorily defined. European settlement and the Chicago fire were just evidence of punctuated equilibrium in the disjunctive march of midwestern progress.

I left Lake Michigan for the Mediterranean in the summer after third grade. My first memories of Athens are awe at the density of the city's history. Not simply the presence of stones, statues, monuments but also the range of discursive memory stretched father and deeper than I had ever seen; in the absence of totalizing newness, the strata of the city's building and becoming was testament to a continuity of production on a scale dwarfing the (European) self-construction of the American heartland. My first insight into the possibility of history was appropriately one of the oldest and commonest thoughts in history, while seeming to me both vast and new.

What surprised me was seeing that history, like the accumulated tomes of libraries, was not an obstacle to the free play of the present so much as an endless grab-bag of particular authority. And though problems can arise (when, for example, only a select few are allowed to grab), with history--as with knowledge, with books--a broad selection could only help the present construction of a fair case. Against the childhood idea of history as something to escape--whose weight and scope made innovation impossible--I was struck by the idea that change was an action, an artifact, an assertion with the power to reorganize history: the effect of emplotment or the famously world-organizing Greek temple.

This impressed, on impressionable me, the great significance of knowledge and of context. The way one moves in historical spaces is different; one's affiliations, politics, interactions are different. The possibilities are ones of reaction and reassemblage in addition to mythic creation. There is a facility of interconnection: the continual sediment of meaning cross-links landscape and gesture like a fine web, echoing the flightpaths between cities and the subterranean hypertext of subways.

Coming to college, I sought the same kind of facility--a knowledge hyperlinked and accumulative beyond the stark ends of terms, which opened itself continually to the project of intelligent remaking. Certainly mine is a less elegant shoring, a less grand collection than stacks of books or caryatids. But this crude and hasty assemblage is itself the urge to seek out Athenian spaces, Greek or otherwise--spaces from which history, at length and in great detail, allows itself to be made and rewritten.

Or so it seemed on that morning on the Acropolis, standing amid people posed for photographs and columns ready for much longer exposures, looking out past the city's bounds to the bright, moving edge of the sea.

Maryanthe E. Malliaris '01 is a mathematics concentrator in Lowell House. This is her final column.