“Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past.”

But history, alas, is not merely a record of what we do, but also a record of what is done to us.

Our men at their departure set the town on fire,

“Your pleasure signals our death.”

or Vincent van Gogh’s mental illness. There’s something about the candle snuffed out prematurely that captures our imagination—it is the thought, perhaps, of the books and paintings and songs that might’ve been, or the idea that artists simply burn too bright for this world.

History is often imagined as a series of events, unfolding one after the other like a sequence of falling dominoes. But most human experiences are processes, not events.

I want to pause here to note a defining feature of humans, which is that we like to know why things happen, especially why really bad things happen. And if a reason is not immediately apparent, we will find one. I

“death would destroy even those pains which are better than nothing.”

In fact, between 1985 and 2005, roughly as many people died of tuberculosis as in World Wars I and II combined.