Samsul Kamil Osman
Sinar suria tampil
segar memancarkan cahaya menerangi pagi hari
ini. Semoga sahaja, sinar suria ini akan berlanjutan hingga ke petang. Semoga
juga tidak akan hadir cahaya suram yang akan menyelubungi awan sehingga menggusarkan hati ramai orang yang
mengharapkan akan ada cahaya menerangi hari-hari yang berlalu sehingga malam
menjelma menggantikan siang. Setiap hati akan selalu berdoa mengharapkan setiap
hari yang dilalui akan hadir bersama sinar kebahagiaan. Setiap hati akan selalu
berdoa, agar setiap langkah yang disusun dan diatur akan membuahkan hasil yang
dapat mencernakan harapan dan mendatangkan kebahagiaan.
Mengimbas kembali liku-liku perjalanan masa yang telah
jauh kita tinggalkan, membuatkan hati selalu berdetik dengan pelbagai kenangan
dan memori yang sering menjentik perasaan. Mengimbas masa lalu, seringkali
membuatkan kita hanyut dibuai perasaan. Perasaan yang pelbagai, bercampur-baur
antara suka, duka, sedih, tawa dan gembira. Dalam kehidupan kita tidak boleh
lepas dari rasa suka dan duka . Itu semua telah menjadi asam garam dalam mengharungi perjalanan merentasi masa lalu menuju ke masa hadapan.
Masa lalu selalu memberi makna yang
besar dengan seribu satu macam kenangan dan pengalaman yang indah, malah
adakalanya manis, adakalanya juga pahit untuk dikenang. Tetapi sesiapapun tidak
akan dapat menolak dan menafikan, bahawa masa lalu mempunyai makna yang cukup besar dalam mencorak dan
memberi perubahan dalam diri seseorang. Masa lalu sememangnya sangat berkait
rapat dengan kejayaan seseorang pada masa kini. Sesiapapun yang berjaya
mengharungi cabaran menimba dan menikmati kejayaan hari ini, tidak akan dapat
menafikan sumbangan masa lalu yang telah menjadi penentu kepada kejayaan
tersebut.
Setiap kita yang
telah berjaya hari ini akan berpendapat bahawa pengalaman masa lalu
telah mengajar dan mendidik sehingga kejayaan tercipta hari ini. Masa lalu itu adalah
sejarah. Sejarah adalah ibu kepada segala ilmu yang telah menyedarkan kepada
manusia akan pentingnya masa lalu sebagai landasan untuk mencipta kejayaan di
masa hadapan. Sejarah adalah landasan untuk menjadi pengukur di antara
kegagalan dan kejayaan, kemunduran dan kemajuan, kebodohan dan kecerdikan, keruntuhan
dan kemasyhuran. Tiada siapapun yang dapat menafikan
pentingnya sejarah dalam mencorak masa depan sesorang. Sejarah masa lalu
adalah pencetus kejayaan di masa hadapan.
Ibnu Khaldun
Kumpulan Pengertian Sejarah menurut Pelbagai Sarjana
What follows are a series of
quotations about history and the historian’s craft. They have been culled from
a variety of sources and they appear here in totally random order. Their
purpose is to incite, energize and stimulate your historical imagination.
* * *
“‘History,’ Stephen said, ‘is a
nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’” James Joyce
“Since history has no properly
scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to
educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then
all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates
themselves.” G. M. Trevelyan.
“To each eye, perhaps, the outlines
of a great civilization present a different picture. In the wide ocean upon
which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the same
studies which have served for my work might easily, in other hands, not only
receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead to essentially
different conclusions.” Jacob Burckhardt
“History is the witness that
testifies to the passing of time; it illuminates reality, vitalizes memory,
provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity.” Cicero
“The past is useless. That explains
why it is past.” Wright Morris
“Faithfulness to the truth of
history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into
special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and
yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator
must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study
events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners
of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a
spectator of the action he describes.”
Francis Parkman.
Francis Parkman
“History . . . is indeed little more
than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Edward Gibbon
“There is properly no history; only
biography.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The study of history is the best
medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite
variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record
you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things
to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid.” Livy
“What experience and history teach
is this-that people and governments never have learned anything from history,
or acted on principles deduced from it.” G.
W. F. Hegel
“Everything must be recaptured and
relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the
difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the
unity of history which is also the unity of life.” Fernand Braudel.
Fernand Braudel
“The function off the historian is
neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master
and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.” E. H. Carr
“If you do not like the past, change
it.” William L. Burton
“History does nothing, possesses no
enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, the real, living man, who
does everything, possesses, fights. It is not History, as if she were a person
apart, who uses men as a means to work out her purposes, but history itself is
nothing but the activity of men pursuing their purposes.” Karl Marx
“An historian should yield himself
to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing
apart from it now and then for a fresh view.” Samuel Eliot Morison
“History is for human
self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a
person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and
thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is.
Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what
they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has
done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and
thus what man is.” R. G. Collingwood
“History is more or less bunk.”
Henry Ford
“That historians should give their
own country a break, I grant you; but not so as to state things contrary to
fact. For there are plenty of mistakes made by writers out of ignorance, and
which any man finds it difficult to avoid. But if we knowingly write what is
false, whether for the sake of our country or our friends or just to be
pleasant, what difference is there between us and hack writers? Readers should
be very attentive to and critical of historians, and they in turn should be
constantly on their guard.” Polybius
“You have reckoned that history
ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the
future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely
tell how it really was.” Leopold von Ranke
“Time in its irresistible and
ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in
the depths of obscurity. . . . But the tale of history forms a very strong
bulwark against the stream of time, and checks in some measure its irresistible
flow, so that, of all things done in it, as many as history has taken over it secures
and binds together, and does not allow them to slip away into the abyss of
oblivion.” Anna Comnena
“Only a good-for-nothing is not
interested in his past.” Sigmund Freud
“Every past is worth condemning.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“The historian does simply not come
in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those
memories that have survived intact.” Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi
“Each age tries to form its own
conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with
reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time.” Frederick Jackson
Turner
SAMSUL KAMIL BIN OSMAN
Teratak Shamida,
Baling, Kedah……
06 Ogos 2012
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