"Paul Park - The Tourist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Paul)

Confederate government $10,000,000 in new loans that the World Bank can
persuade Lee to attack at Gettysburg at all--"I have a real bad feeling
about this," he says over and over. "I love my boys," he says. "Please
don't make me do it." Who can blame him? He has a book of Matthew
Brady's
photographs on his desk.
And in fact, why should he be persuaded? What difference does it make?
People hold onto these arbitrary rules, these arbitrary patterns, out
of
fear. Not even all historians are able to concede the latest
proofs--confirmations of everything they feared and half-suspected when
they were in graduate school--that events in the past have no
discernible
effect upon the present. That time is not after all a continuum. That
the
past is like a booster rocket, constantly dropping away. Afterward,
it's
disposable. Except for the most recent meeting of the AHA (Vienna,
1815--Prince Metternich the keynote speaker, and a drunken lecher, by
all
 reports), American historians now rarely go abroad except as tourists.
They are both depressed and liberated to find that their work has no
practical application.
That's not completely true. It certainly changed things, for example,
when
people found out that the entire known opus of Rembrandt van Rijn
consisted of forgeries. But that's a matter of money; it's business
contacts that people want anyway, not understanding. So everywhere you
go
back then are phalanxes of oilmen, diplomats, arms dealers, art
collectors, and teachers of English as a second language. Citibank
recently pre-empted slave gangs working on the pyramid of Cheops, to
help
complete their Giza offices. The World Wildlife Fund has projects (Save
the Trilobites, etc.) into the Precambrian era-- projects doomed to
failure by their very nature.
Of course the news is not all bad: world profiles for literacy and
public
health have been transformed. In 1349 the International Red Cross has
seven hundred volunteers in Northern Italy alone. And the Peace Corps,
my
God, they're everywhere. But nevertheless I thought I could discern a
trend, that all the world and all of history would one day share the
same
dismal denominator. Alone in my house on Washon Island, which I'd kept
after Suzanne and I broke up, I saw every reason to stay put. I am a
cautious person by nature.

But that summer I was too much by myself. And so I took advantage of a
special offer; there had been some terrorist attacks on Americans in