Everything Is Illuminated

I've been feeling like I've been shortchanging my blog a little bit. Treating it more as a travelogue than a place where I actually write down some of my thoughts. So, I think I'll write down some thoughts I had about the film Everything Is Illuminated, since Zach just watched it.

Let me give you a brief synopsis of the film in case you haven't seen it: Jonathon's(Elijah Wood) hobby is to collect random pieces of his family's history. For example, he has plastic bags with old retainers, photographs, ticket stubs, etc... hung up with pushpins all over his walls. His grandparents were from the Ukraine and so he ends up going to look for his family's history there. He meets up with Alex, a Ukrainian young man who is his translator, and they travel around looking for his grandparents' village. It's a road movie, but it's a road movie that is making a profound statement about history.

In college I had a history course and the professor spent the first day asking every student why we were in the class, what the point was of studying history. I don't remember what I said, but I remember a lot of people said the whole "if you don't know the mistakes of the past, you are bound to repeat them/ you can't know where you are going until you know where you've been" blah blah blah line. Anyway, the last assignment for the class at the end of the semester was to write a paper on the same subject: why do we study history? I had recently watched E.I.I. and I was struck by a few things. There is a part where the American in the film, Elijah Wood, is telling his Ukranian translator that his shirt is on "inside-out" to which he responds, "What does it mean 'inside-out'?" The American starts to respond but very quickly realizes the language barrier will make this conversation much more difficult than it is worth and he just ends up saying, "Forget it."

At the end of the film, the Ukranian is writing a letter to the American and says, "I know what you mean now about 'inside-out.' History is us 'inside-out.'" I thought that was incredibly profound and I started realizing that this film is a film about history (or at least it was to me, as a history major) and how it affects us.

I had this revelation in college that I can pithily sum up in the phrase: to know, is to love (partially stolen from the French proverb, "To know all, is to forgive all"). When we study history, let's say Russian history, we are seeing Russian people "inside out." By studying history, we are learning what is "inside" people in the present. To study someone in the past, is to love someone in the present. Does that make sense? When we know someone's history, they become "illuminated" to us. Bathed in a heavenly glow, if you will. So, to sum up, to know is to love; therefore, to study the past is to love in the present.

I could talk for a while about different things in that movie, but I'll just mention one more thing. I've copied Jonathon in that I carry around plastic bags everywhere if I find something interesting to collect during the day. I actually have a few boxes at my parents house of random stuff from Turkey and my last trip to Russia.