“The Past is your Present” – a Last Lecture by Prof. Randall Lesaffer
Professor Randall Lesaffer is a professor most of us Liberal Arts and Sciences students know for his lectures, in which he seems to control the room. He knows so much that it’s almost scary. During the Last Lecture organized by Extra Muros on February 24th we have come to see another side of this inspiring professor: he was nervous.
Professor Lesaffer started out by telling us that we were lucky, as he was debating whether he would come or not. The morbid idea of giving a Last Lecture made him doubt, and he made all of his listeners place their hands on wood to un-jinx the temptation of the gods in a Machiavellian way. We all repeated after him: “I hope this is not your last lecture and that many more will follow”. After we all repeated him (because of course we want many more to follow) he cynically asked us why we do not do this before every lecture. Quite an ice-breaker. This wasn’t the Lesaffer we knew.
He sat down in a chair and was going to play a song for us on his guitar. Either he has excellent invisible skills or it was just a song played through the speakers, but either way, this is how he introduced us to his theme: Gianmaria Testa singing Le Traiettorie delle mongolfiere. This song tells us about what we experience when we see a hot-air balloon: a sense of foreverness arises. We do not know where this balloon came from and we do not know where it is going. It seems as though we have found an unmoving element of our days. Lesaffer lays the link with when we are laying by the beach in the summer and we are staring in the sky. A hot-air balloon comes by, time seems to stand still and it feels as though we’re at the end of history.
Throughout the lecture, we realized why we were seeing a different side of this brilliant man. He said that he did not like being in the spotlight. After some snickering in the lecture room he explained that he only likes publically talking when he has something to say, and that talking about himself was definitely not something he enjoyed. A mental sigh of relief blazed through the lecture room: good, he is normal after all.
Lesaffer characterizes himself as a lawyer in the world but a historian at heart, and he explains us that he has been working in the political scene for quite some time. Lesaffer clearly has been around, but this excellent Last Lecture has shown us where he would like to be. Lesaffer loves history. He has praised it throughout the entire lecture: history is about building a bridge between yourself and people who are no longer here, it’s practicing human empathy. When Lesaffer met one of his heroes, the French author Marguerite Yourcenar, he was told that if he wanted to be a teacher and teach everything, to teach life, he ought to teach history, as history is life.
The second hero Lesaffer speaks of is Machiavelli. He was an anti-hero; he provokes and becomes the victim of his own theory. Lesaffer explains that Machiavelli was misunderstood, in the sense that all he did in writing the Prince was give a historical view of what had happened in the past. There, the past is the present as Machiavelli has written one of the most debated political words we know in the Western world.
Then the third hero: Churchill. Churchill read history, wrote history, made history and even predicted history. Churchill did all one can do looking at history, and wisely used history to actually learn something today. This brings us to one of the lessons Lesaffer taught us today: you have to study the past because only by paying close attention can you escape it: history repeats itself because people want it to repeat itself.
We should not only focus on the explanatory function of history; we make history in the present and it will teach us more about us then about the past. History is about story-telling – if you want to reach out, you should tell stories, and if you wanted to be reached out to, listen to stories. A circle is created: we can only teach by listening to history and we can only learn by listening to history.
To close off his lecture, Lesaffer returns to his opening theme: the hot-air balloon and the idea that we’re at the end of history. This is a mistake: you think so only because you have allowed yourself to do so. It will get better. Or worse.
By Kayleigh van Oorschot
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