The student of history is a student of humility.

From Alfred’s journal

The historical marker by the creek lost a bolt in the wind and hung sideways all morning, so I read it upside down from the maple. A battle, four hundred men, a date in October, and nobody on the path stopped once in an hour. I used to think the point of the plaque was the four hundred men. For years I took history to be a stack of things worth remembering, and the stack kept getting taller and I kept feeling taller with it. Then Switch asked me whose field it had been before the battle and I did not know, and I have no plaque for that either; the student of history is a student of humility. The creek was making the same noise it made in October of whatever year that was.