Secret Histories of The Real World
Originally, secret histories were designed as non-fictional, revealing or claiming to reveal the truth behind the "spin": one such example is the Secret History of the Mongols. Secret histories can range from standard historical revisionism with proper critical reexamination of historical facts to negative historical revisionism wherein facts are deliberately omitted, suppressed or distorted.
The exemplar secret history is the Anecdota of Procopius of Caesarea (known for centuries as the Secret History). It was discovered, centuries after it was written, in the Vatican Library and published in 1623, although its existence was already known from the Suda, which referred to it as the Anekdota ("the unpublished composition"). The Secret History covers roughly the same years as the first seven books of the History of Justinian's Wars and appears to have been written after they were published. Current consensus generally dates it to 550 or 558, possibly as late as 562. It portrays the reign of the Roman Emperor Justinian I to the great disadvantage of the Emperor, his wife and some of his court.
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““As for your world of art and your world of reality,” she replied, “you have to separate the two, because you can’t bear to know what you are.... The world of art is only the truth about the real world.””
—D.H. (David Herbert)
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—Joseph O’Donnell. Clifford Sanforth. Donald Jordan, Murder by Television, trying to bribe Perry into revealing Professor Houghland’s secret (1935)
“The histories of the lives and fortunes of men are full of instances of this nature,—where favorable times and lucky accidents have done for them, what wisdom or skill could not.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“The fear of death is indeed the pretence of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“The world is the mirror of myself dying.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)