Enlightened Librarian: Burrowing history

Burrowing history · Nov 14, 12:12 AM

Two of my favourite books growing up taught how history isn’t just about textbooks and dates, but about generations of people stamping around, building up, tearing down, living and dying on a single patch of earth. David Macaulay’s Cathedral and Castle gave a child a god’s-eye view of a piece of ground, setting up a time-lapse sequence over centuries of hammering, carving and setting-into-place. His books introduced the idea—profound to a kid just starting to explore his place in the world—that buildings aren’t just hollow boxes for living but have a history of all the hands that help build them. And underneath each one is the plot of earth that they start from and that can be recovered again—all you have to do is leaf through the story in reverse and return to the first page.

I’ve found that wishing to drill down through the history of a place can be a powerful, almost magnetic urge—especially when the place is new and strange and the order of the day is to live there. Having moved to a new city, I’ve started to know where I am by, first of all, memorizing routes and intersections and internalizing the map. But I also want to know how this particular civic landscape got its flavour, with its remnant whiffs of logging town and garrison in a modern, capital city.

Fortunately, I found a wonderful book. Phil Jenkin’s An Acre of Time takes a single acre in the city, in a place not far from me, sets the first scene at the formation of the earth itself, then starts the jittery time-lapse of unfolding millenia. Eventually, aboriginal peoples arrive to hunt there, then European start inexorably writing deeds and pounding down a settlement. The acre itself fills up with the tramp of souls, and for Jenkins, the written records eventually blend into the reminiscences of old-timers, who together weave a rich pageant of lives in a modest frame and brick neighbourhood. Wistfully, the story halts with an expropriation order that levels the field and turns it to an urban planner’s blank slate.

The book sweeps you along, and like Macaulay’s, provides the material for drilling into a place, mining it out, and making it live in the mind. The process is a romance, and the object is a spiritual wedding with one piece of the world.

Another book that recreates a place’s past brilliantly—if obsessively—is a book by the late Canadian artist, Greg Curnoe. Artistically, Curnoe was wedded to his home base of London, Ontario, and made art and lived in a former printing shop near the city’s Thames river. In Deeds/Abstracts: The History of a London Lot he records seemingly every scrap of information about the place as far back as he can go, which is pretty far—the first entry is dated 8,600 B.C. The resulting log of notes scoured from archives, published accounts and his own backyard archeology releases a profound continuum of time from a single peck of dirt.

David Macaulay. Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.
—. Castle. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1977

Greg Curnoe. Deeds/Abstracts: The History of a London Lot. London, Ont.: Brick Books, 1995.

Phil Jenkins. An Acre of Time. Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross , 1997.

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