Should the historian’s personal life happen to coincide in some way with the history he has chosen to write about—if the personal history “doubles” the public history—then an alchemy occurs whereby the historian, in a sense, becomes the history. That is, once rendered in all the signs and symbols at the historian’s command, the history he has written becomes, for him, the story of his own life. This fact may not be obvious to the reader except in flashes and flickers of reflected thought, where the passion of the historian for the story peers out, naked, from the page. There, for a flicker of a moment, we find the historian exposed, if only the world decides to correctly interpret the clues. (I didn’t write this. I was quoting another historian. I can’t even remember which one.)

In expressing this theory—a theory that calls for the historian to internalize a selected portion of history as part of his or her life; or, more specifically, to map historical events to personal events—Duncan was deeply influenced by the work of the idiosyncratic Nicean philosopher-historian Edgar Rybern. Rybern believed that the personal politics of each individual distorts their view of history. As Rybern wrote in his book Approaches to History (a book Sabon violently disapproved of, even during her days at the Academy):

Such a person never merely traces the outline of the past. Texts do not sit side by side on the shelf, but intermingle, entering into conflict and confluence with one another until the probable emerges from the impossible. Reduced to rubble, such sources provide the raw building material for a theory of greater import and durability. However, the story that emerges from this process does not interest such a historian. The tale told is mere preamble to explanation, preamble to a more personal theory. In such a process, the chronology and lineage of the acts depicted in the narrative depend on the prejudices and experiences of the individual’s psyche, and the subconscious impulses embedded therein.

Based on Rybern’s musings, Duncan began to ask himself—in countless articles published in the hapless AFTOIS newsletter, and in countless conversations with Lacond—“Why not consciously distort history by focusing on those portions and patterns that have the most relevance or resonance to one’s own life?”

Such a slant would, presumably, intensify the empathy that the historian has to those particular historical events. For example, I, as a historian, would be most at home describing the history of various mental wards and the effects on the psyche of mass slaughter witnessed up close.

If every individual mind can be said to exist within a lively morass of prejudice and subjectivity, then the pursuit of the objective becomes a futile, laughable goal—in effect, a lie; especially in a field such as history, where every day, every hour, every minute, the historian becomes more distant from the core occurrences under observation. (A simplification, true, but essentially accurate. Not that it matters to anyone anymore. History is about to catch up with us, and what I’ve really learned is that anything connected to the printed page becomes a kind of tombstone, marking the death of the past.)