26 I want to suggest three alternative reasons for doing history, and for why it matters. The first is simply ‘enjoyment’. There is a pleasure in studying the past, just as there is in studying music or art or films or botany or the stars. Some of us gain pleasure from looking at old documents, gazing at old paintings, and seeing something of a world that is not entirely our own. I hope that if nothing else, this short introduction has allowed you to enjoy certain elements of the historical past, that you have gained pleasure in meeting Guilhem de Rodes, Lorenzo Valla, Leopold von Ranke, George Burdett, and Sojourner Truth. 27 Leading on from this is my second reason: using history as something with which to think. Studying history necessarily involves taking oneself out of one’s present context and exploring an alternative world. This cannot help but make us more aware of our own lives and contexts. To see how differently people have behaved in the past presents us with an opportunity to think about how we behave, why we think in the ways we do, what things we take for granted or rely upon. To study history is to study ourselves, not because of an elusive ‘human nature’ to be refracted from centuries gone by, but because history throws us into stark relief. Visiting the past is something like visiting a foreign country: they do some things the same and some things differently, but above all else they make us more aware of what we call ‘home’. 28 Lastly, my third reason. This again is connected with the first two: to think differently about oneself, to gather something of how we ‘come about’ as individual human beings, is also to be made aware of the possibility of doing things differently. This returns me to a point made in the first chapter of this book: that history is an argument, and arguments present the opportunity for change . When presented with some dogmatist claiming that ‘this is the only course of action’ or ‘this is how things have always been’, history allows us to demur, to point out that there have always been many courses of action, many ways of being. History provides us with the tools to dissent. 29 We must bring this short book to a close. Now that I have made the introductions (‘Reader, this is history; history, this is the reader’) I greatly hope you will continue your acquaintance. There is a writer I much admire, an American novelist called Tim O’Brien. He spent time as a soldier in Vietnam, and his writing struggles with the possibility and impossibility of telling a ‘true war story’, and what that might mean. He captures, much better that myself, the tremendous importance of the paradox within that phrase. To him, then, we give the last words: ‘But this is true too: stories can save us’.