Dear Nikola,

Thank you or your letter with the subject, history as myth, and with the quotation from Winston Churchill. This, as you know, is a topic of much interest to me, on which I have brooded or many years. My comments:

a) It is not necessary, or even necessarily desirable, to try to calibrate myth using standards of "objective" truth. I consider all history to be "myth", a poetic account of the past, a narrative which has been molded by the spiritual needs of the mind which invents it.

b) I acknowledge the social and political value of "objective" history, which is anchored to documentary and monumental relics and serves as an intellectual and emotional framework for a given society. As a member of society, I accept, adopt and comply with the postulates and imperatives of objective history. As an individual, such "objective history" becomes meaningful when, as an element of my subjective experience it is integrated into, and becomes part of my understanding of the past as myth.

c) My primary interpretation is that history is my subjective experience not of your past, not of the past of the world, but of my past, of the cumulative minutes, hours, days, weeks and months of the 90 years that I have lived, as I recapitulate them in my memory, however incompletely, supported by the voluminous and detailed documentation which members of my family and I have preserved. I recognize this recapitulated memory far from being an accounting of what "really happened," but rather as a fluctuating retrospective, a poetic synthesis, which incorporates and reflects the imperatives of my present existence.  It is this poetic synthesis which I designate as myth, and which I purport to recognize as the model of all of my intellectual apprehensions of the past, including "objective history."

d) You quote Churchill's instruction that one should act according to ones "conscience." I find this imperative to be nonspecific, so long as the relationships between "conscience" and calculation, logic, convention, morality and ethics remain unspecified.

EJM