Barnes. Pdf

married for?), and so on. The central couple are in a profoundly abnormal state; yet try telling them that. Their condition feels 
more normal than it has ever done before. This is normal, they say to one another; all that time before, which we thought was 
normal, wasn't normal at all. 
And such conviction of normality, such certainty that their essence has been developed and fixed by love, and is now to be 
framed forever, gives them a touching arrogance. This is definitely abnormal: when else is arrogance touching? It is here. Look 
at the photo again: study, beneath the happy dentition, the serious self-satisfaction of the moment. How can you not be moved? 
Couples noisy with their love (for nobody has ever loved before - not properly - have they?) may irritate, but can't be mocked. 
Even when there's something to make an emotional conformist smirk - some thumping disparity of age, looks, education, 
pretension - the couple have for this moment a lacquer finish: laughter's bubbling spittle simply wipes off. The young man on 
the older woman's arm, the frump attached to the dandy, the hostess chained to an ascetic: they all feel profoundly 

---

J
ULIAN 
B
ARNES
: A History of the World in 10 ½
 
Chapters 
76
[p. 240]
normal. And this should move us. They will be feeling indulgent towards us, because we are not so evidently, so rowdily in 
love; yet we should be discreetly indulgent towards them. 
Don't get me wrong. I'm not recommending one form of love over another. I don't know if prudent or reckless love is the 
better, monied or penniless love the surer, heterosexual or homosexual love the sexier, married or unmarried love the stronger. 
I may be tempted towards didacticism, but this isn't an advice column. I can't tell you whether or not you're in love. If you need 
to ask, then you probably aren't, that's my only advice (and even this might be wrong). I can't tell you who to love, or how to 
love: those school courses would be how-not-not-to as much as how-to classes (it's like creative writing - you can't teach them 
how to write or what to write, only usefully point out where they're going wrong and save them time). But I can tell you why to 
love. Because the history of the world, which only stops at the half-house of love to bulldoze it into rubble, is ridiculous 
without it. The history of the world becomes brutally self-important without love. Our random mutation is essential because it 
is unnecessary. Love won't change the history of the world (that nonsense about Cleopatra's nose is strictly for sentimentalists), 
but it will do something much more important: teach us to stand up to history, to ignore its chin-out strut. I don't accept your 
terms, love says; sorry, you don't impress, and by the way what a silly uniform you're wearing. Of course, we don't fall in love 
to help out with the world's ego problem; yet this is one of love's surer effects. 
Love and truth, that's the vital connection, love and truth. Have you ever told so much truth as when you were first in love? 
Have you ever seen the world so clearly? Love makes us see the truth, makes it our duty to tell the truth. Lying in bed: listen to 
the undertow of warning in that phrase. Lying in bed, we tell the truth: it sounds like a paradoxical sentence from a first-year 
philosophy primer. But it's more (and less) than that: a description of moral duty. Don't roll that eyeball, give a flattering groan, 
fake that orgasm. Tell the truth with your body even if - especially if - that truth is not melodramatic. Bed is one of the 
[p. 241]
prime places where you can lie without getting caught, where you can holler and grunt in the dark and later boast about your 
`performance'. Sex isn't acting (however much we admire our own script); sex is about truth. How you cuddle in the dark 
governs how you see the history of the world. It's as simple as that. 
We get scared by history; we allow ourselves to be bullied by dates. 
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two
Columbus sailed the ocean blue 
And then what? Everyone became wiser? People stopped building new ghettoes in which to practise the old persecutions? 
Stopped making the old mistakes, or new mistakes, or new versions of old mistakes? (And does history repeat itself, the first 
time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that's too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again 
that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.) 
Dates don't tell the truth. They bawl at us - left, right, left, right, pick 'em up there you miserable shower. They want to 
make us think we're always progressing, always going forward. But what happened after 1492? 
In fourteen hundred and ninety-three
He sailed right back across the sea
That's the sort of date I like. Let's celebrate 1493, not 1492; the return, not the discovery. What happened in 1493? The 
predictable glory, of course, the royal flattery, the heraldic promotions on the Columbus scutcheon. But there was also this. 
Before departure a prize of 10,000 maravedis had been promised to the fist man to sight the New World. An ordinary sailor 
had won this bounty, yet when the expedition returned Columbus claimed it for himself (the dove still elbowing the raven from 
history). The sailor went off in disappointment to
[p. 242]
Morocco where, they say, he became a renegade. It was an interesting year, 1493. 
History isn't what happened. History is just what historians tell us. There was a pattern, a plan, a movement, expansion, the 
march of democracy; it is a tapestry, a flow of events, a complex narrative, connected, explicable. One good story leads to 
another. First it was kings and archbishops with some offstage divine tinkering, then it was the march of ideas and the 
movements of masses, then little local events which mean something bigger, but all the time it's connections, progress, 
meaning, this led to this, this happened because of this. And we, the readers of history, the sufferers from history, we scan the 
pattern for hopeful conclusions, for the way ahead. And we cling to history as a series of salon pictures, conversation pieces 
whose participants we can easily reimagine back into life, when all the time it's more like a multi-media collage, with paint 
applied by decorator's roller rather than camel-hair brush. 
The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old 
stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections. We lie here in our hospital bed of the present 
(what nice clean sheets we get nowadays) with a bubble of daily news drip-fed into our arm. We think we know who we are, 
though we don't quite know why we're here, or how long we shall be forced to stay. And while we fret and writhe in bandaged 
uncertainty - are we a voluntary patient? - we fabulate. We make up a story to cover the facts we don't know or can't accept; we 
keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it 
history. 
There's one thing I'll say for history. It's very good at finding things. We try to cover them up, but history doesn't let go. It's 
got time on its side, time and science. However ferociously we ink over our first thoughts, history finds a way of reading them. 
We bury our victims in secrecy (strangled princelings, irradiated reindeer), but history discovers what we did to them. We lost 
the Titanic, forever it seemed, in the squid-ink depths, but 

---

J
ULIAN 
B
ARNES
: A History of the World in 10 ½