Impractical writing

Historians decide interconnectedness as much as sequence. In Not by Fact Alone, John Clive describes the historians’ craft, moments of inspiration and pauses that are different from novelists and yet also similar. They too must avoid sociological treatment yet retain judgment, insert first-person voices and meaningful gossip to bring form to otherwise shapeless affairs, transition from paragraph to paragraph to build a three-dimensional world. Clive asks how and why historians in the West came to occupy the role of priests, i.e., to establish cause and effect relationships between past and present, while excluding the role of chance - or God. There was no practical utility.