Turn! Turn! Turn!

Current always was a vanity project

My students don’t like the book of Ecclesiastes. I know this for sure because I force them, week after week, to read the whole thing aloud. Worse, I insist that they reflect on what is being said in every individual passage. The Preacher begins by pronouncing, “Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” And after ranting along those lines for eleven chapters—halfway through the final one—he still has not got this bleak thought out of his system or otherwise calmed himself down one whit. In the middle of chapter twelve we hear yet again the same grating howl: “Meaningless! Meaningless! Everything is meaningless!”

Those who are unwilling to accept this message tend to cling tenaciously to their rose-colored theory that the last two verses of the book somehow take it all back. Some of my students seem to imagine the whole thing as if we are in Wayne’s World and—after Almighty God has faked us out for twelve chapters—he suddenly blurts out Not! and snickers.

My students, however, are not allowed to skip to the ending. They have to take the contents of Ecclesiastes in order, paragraph by paragraph, bit by bit. I spread it out over the four months of the course. This is far too long. The Preacher, like most preachers, tends to repeat himself. Thus they are obliged to face yet again the idea they have already done their best to brush off.

Current always was a vanity project. It is time to face its meaninglessness.

The course in which we declaim aloud the entirety of Ecclesiastes is titled “Historiography,” a mouthful of a word that I define as the philosophy and craft of history writing. By carping on and on about vanity, the Preacher wants to drive two thoughts into our heads. The first is that anything we lean on too heavily to bring us satisfaction will leave us dissatisfied in the end. The richest people in the world are restlessly, anxiously scheming to make more money. It is literally somehow never enough. To make too much of something is to make an idol of it, and our idols always fail us. If our sense of the loss of Current seems disproportionate, then perhaps that is a sign that we wanted from it more than it could give, more than anything under the sun can give.  This too is meaningless.

The second message of the Preacher is that in this temporal world of ours nothing lasts forever. You can build a house or plant a garden, but someday it will be gone. There is a time for little magazines to be born, and there is a time for them to die. There is time to search for readers and subscribers, and a time to give up searching. There is a time to speak out, and a time to go dark. This too is meaningless.

We read Ecclesiastes in the Historiography course because it provides the perspective one needs to pursue the task of writing history. It is shocking to contemplate how little of the past has left a trace. Mighty, conquering peoples that were once the most powerful on earth have so completely vanished that not even a single name is remembered from them. This summer my wife Jane and I plan to go to Machu Picchu, Peru. It is one of the most impressive monuments from a past civilization in the entire world, but the people who built it have disappeared so thoroughly that scholars are not even sure why they built it. One could say the same for Stonehenge.

I have spent my life as a historian sheepishly explaining to people who ask about my work that I do something so seemingly arcane and pointless: studying people whom they have never heard of. They seem to almost plead, “Is there not one person in this whole multi-year project of yours whose name I would recognize?” I myself have longed to study someone famous—if for no other reason than to improve my cocktail party conversation.

There are, however, not many people from the past whose fame has lasted. And invariably, those few have already been well picked over by earlier historians. I thought I finally pulled the trick off with my book John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life. As it turned out, not a single student in my entire graduate-level course had ever even heard of J. S. Mill. If that is true of one of most celebrated philosophers in all of history, then what does it mean for the lowly historian whose greatest claim to fame is to have written yet one more book about the Utilitarian philosopher? Of the making of many books there is no end. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

On a more cheerful note, the Preacher says that the person God has blessed in their work is someone who has been kept “occupied with gladness of heart.” Writing for Current has kept me occupied with gladness of heart, as has reading what others have written for Current. In the end, I tell my students (and myself) that you cannot let your own sense of your work’s worth be held hostage by its reception. You do not control its reception. This is the part you control: You can spend your time doing something that you believe is inherently worth doing. Writing for Current—and reading Current—has been one of those things for me. I do not regret a single moment.

As it happens, the three founders of Current—John Fea, Jay Green, and Eric Miller—have all thought a great deal about Historiography. I first learned to think of them as a team when they edited together Confessing History: Explorations in Christian Faith and the Historian’s Vocation. Green’s single-authored contribution to this subject is Christian Historiography: Five Rival Versions; Fea’s is Why Study History? Reflecting on the Importance of the Past. Fea, Green, and Miller. As the editors of Current, they were four years in power, serving as our unremunerated guides to the turbulent present as well as the vanishing past. 

In chapter after chapter in Ecclesiastes, the Preacher warns us against confusing the temporal with the eternal. Nothing under the suns lasts. There is a time to build and a time to tear down; a time to gather and a time to scatter. Little magazines are vanity projects, doomed to die.

Still, God made Current beautiful in its time.

Timothy Larsen teaches at Wheaton College and is an Honorary Fellow at Edinburgh University. He is the author of Twelve Classic Christmas Stories: A Feast of Yuletide Times, John Stuart Mill: A Secular Life, and the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Christmas.