We may call Eurydice forth from the world of the dead, but we cannot make her answer; and when we turn to look at her we glimpse her only for a moment, before she slips from our grasp and flees. As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.
The quote reflects the enigmatic nature of the past and our struggle to connect with it. Eurydice, representing memories or figures from history, can be summoned but remains elusive, highlighting the difficulty we face in fully understanding or retrieving those lost moments. The metaphor of the past as a "great darkness" suggests that while echoes of history may reach us, they are often distorted by time and context, leaving us with...
