History

" I’d known for a long time why I loved history. It was because the historians made it sound so coherent, so purposeful, so complete. They’d take an entire century and impose a meaning on it, a personality, a destiny - and this was, of course, a lie. 

But it soothed me in my solitude to read that sort of writing, to think that the fourteenth century was a “distant mirror”, to paraphrase a famous title, to believe that we could learn from whole eras as if they had existed with marvelous continuity simply for us."

Anne Rice always does it best. She describes what I feel with unerring accuracy.