These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. And although some have argued against the need for, or desirability of, maintaining any ‘historical consciousness’, ‘historicisation’-the putting of experience into temporal narrative form-is virtually universal, and it is hard (at least in our developed Western culture) to see how life would be possible without the application of some such provision of meaning, that links together (however arbitrarily) the past and present and future. We use language, without thinking about it as such, during our every waking moment, and quite often in our dream-filled sleep. For language and history are quite literally all-pervasive in our lives: it is inconceivable that we could live without them. Emerson’s seemingly paradoxical assertion with which we headed Chapter 3-that ‘Every thought is a prison also’-is particularly pertinent in relation to the two ‘cages’ under consideration here: those of language and history.
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