Toynbee: How History can enrich perception

Arnold Toynbee, in A Study of History, digresses to muse upon…

“the experience of a communion on the mundane plane with persons and events from which, in his usual state of consciousness, he is sundered by a great gulf of Time and Space that, in ordinary circumstances, is impassable for all his faculties except his intellect. A tenuous long-distance commerce exclusively on the intellectual plane is an historian’s normal relation to the objects of his study; yet there are moments in his mental life — moments as memorable as they are rare — in which temporal and spatial barriers fall and psychic distance is annihilated; and in such moments of inspiration the historian finds himself transformed in a flash from a remote spectator into an immediate participant, as the dry bones take flesh and quicken into life.

He then gives this example from his own life:

“The present writer, for example, still retained, some forty years after one experience of the kind, an abiding sense of personal participation in the war of 90-80 B.C. between Rome and her Italian allies as lasting consequence of the instantaneous effect on him of a passage in the table of contents (periocha) of the eighty-ninth book of Livy’s history upon which he had stumbled one day when, during his reading as an undergraduate for the school of Literae Humaniores at Oxford, he was unexpectantly ploughing his way through the surviving précis of the lost books of Livy’s work in the faint hope of gleaning some additional scraps of knowledge of the appalling history of the Hellenic World in the last two centuries B.C… As the student read this quickening passage of an arid epitome, he was transported, in a flash, across the gulf of Time and Space from Oxford in A.D. 1911 to Teanum in 80 B.C., to find himself in a back yard on a dark night witnessing a personal tragedy that was more bitter than the defeat of any public cause.”

(my emphasis)