The Ghosts of History

It is Sunday. As is usual most weekends, I am in the museum working on some research article, preparing for a lecture or simply thinking. The telephone doesn’t ring and I can keep the pushy email at bay.

We spend most of our lives racing without dedicating enough time to pausing and contemplating. Last year we celebrated Darwin and his work and I stop and ask myself if the world of the 21st Century might be capable of producing a Darwin? The Origin was the product of observation and thought: Darwin one day took off on a world tour and had the time to do both. He did not have the incessant interruptions and bureaucratic intrusions that might have otherwise plagued him and kept him from expressing his genius. And the world would have suffered as a result.

Being alone inside the museum is almost like being in Dr Who’s tardis. I’m sitting in a room that is a curious mix of Mediterranean and Empire: sash windows and Genoese shutters are at peace today; as if this day of rest had given them a temporary reprieve from the hooting monsters that spew out diesel and petrol fumes on Line Wall Road every other day of the week. A hanging uniform, once proudly worn by a regimental sergeant-major of the South Staffordshire Regiment around 1900, silently imposes its presence upon me and makes me feel miniscule within history’s macroscopic agenda. Books narrate to me the well-rehearsed stories of Empire’s splendour but I just cannot get into the mind of the person who wore that coat. And I wonder whose history it is that I am reading?

The ageless church bells peal. You might be forgiven for almost expecting to hear the clatter of a company of Tommies as they march past outside, but that was another time…The space that I am occupying is timeless. How many stories have been told here? How many ephemeral lives have entered and left this space, unrecorded by the scribes, discarded to eternal anonymity? It is not an easy thing to grasp history’s reality. We construct and deconstruct filtered strands that have reached us from the past and which our imaginations then shape; and like Borges’ Averroes the characters simply vanish the moment I stop thinking of them.

I leave the room to wander along the galleries of an unlit and sleeping museum. My torch shines here and there revealing muskets and scarabs, flint knives and steel swords; and I see myself in the reflection on the glass pane from one of the cases. I struggle to assimilate how many other reflections there might have been in this very place. Perhaps we should imagine the lives of those other people who have shared the same space. With a little help from the objects which they left behind, and with a large helping of humility, we might just be able to get under their skin; in the process we may get glimpses of their lives and discover history.



Clive Finlayson

This article was first published in the Gibraltar Chronicle