Life & Wisdom Quote by Howard Nemerov

Nemerov sneaks a poet's warning into what sounds like a professional ethic. Yes, the historian is "terribly responsible" to facts - the word choice is doing work. "Terribly" carries moral dread, not just methodological rigor, as if the archive were a tribunal. But then he turns the knife: a historian is "nothing" if he doesn't "make out a case". That courtroom phrasing is the tell. History, he implies, is never just evidence; it's advocacy, selection, narrative pressure.

The intent isn't to license fabrication. It's to puncture the fantasy of neutral recording. "Discern" admits facts aren't raw materials waiting to be picked up; they're perceived through limits of attention, surviving sources, and the historian's own era. Nemerov, writing as a poet, is especially alert to how form makes meaning: arrangement is interpretation. You can be scrupulous and still mislead by what you foreground, what you bracket, the metaphors you smuggle in, the causality you imply by simple sequencing.

The subtext lands in the uneasy space between scholarship and storytelling. If you refuse to "make out a case", you produce a chronicle: inert, morally evasive, functionally unreadable. If you make too strong a case, you risk turning history into prosecution - a brief with footnotes. Nemerov's line argues that the historian's real responsibility is double: to the facts and to the reader's need for intelligible stakes. The danger isn't bias; it's pretending you don't have one.