Difficult To Cure

I often worry that there is not enough separation between my job and the rest of me, especially my sense of self – especially when my employer has been contemplating whether to expel me from academia. This morning brought some relief from such thoughts, not so much because the threat of the axe has been lifted for the moment but because I realised that there is one way in which the two can be clearly distinguished. On the one hand, I’m professionally dubious and suspicious; the whole point about being a historian is that you don’t take sources at face value, you recognise that things are usually if not always more complex than any single perspective would claim, and you instinctively wonder about motives. This includes one’s wife sharing a ‘reel’ purporting to show a storm last night in Berlin, when it has a caption to the effect of “of course they’ll blame this on Putin too”, which she hadn’t really registered; maybe it’s genuine footage being repurposed, rather than a fake put…