Ruiz draws a reader in quickly, with an allusion to the Black Death in Boccaccio’s Decameron, a reflection on Goya’s El sueño de la razón produce monstruos, and a point borrowed from Mircea Eliade to the effect that individual and collective responses to the unpredictability of history—“the weight of endless cycles of war, oppression, and cruelty beyond description”—reveal Western civilization as a continuous dialogue between reason and unreason. Oh, and Paul Klee.

An historian of Medieval and Renaissance Europe, Ruiz insists on regarding Western civilization not as a set of conditions rooted in the past, but as a process of becoming—a view to which I am supremely sympathetic. The lives of European societies, especially over long periods of time, are too variegated, too polychromatic to be captured by any but the most facile universal narrative. Taking to heart Walter Benjamin’s gloomy allegory of the “angel of history,” Ruiz here sets out to “brush history against the grain” and to write an account that takes seriously the suffering imposed by the great cultural achievement of Progress.

Ruiz takes the writing of history as a way of grappling with the agonizing existential questions—why and how do we live? what is our place in the universe?—that trouble all thinking humans:

Suspecting or knowing that there is probably no meaning or order in the universe, we combat this dark perspective by continuously making meaning, by imposing order on our chaotic and savage past, by constructing explanatory schemes that seek to justify and elucidate what is essentially inexplicable. These half-hearted attempts to explain the inexplicable and to make sense of human cruelty are what we call “history”. It is the writing of history itself.

As a framework for his discussion of human attempts to deal with crisis (whether social, structural, or existential), Ruiz adopts a scheme developed by Johan Huizinga, who posited three ways that late medieval people dealt with the uncertainties of their lives: religion, possessions and pursuit of the sensual, and aesthetic or artistic yearnings. For Ruiz, all are forms of escape from History.

As the most common response to the Terror of History, religion may take the form of mystical rapture, or communal feelings translated into millennial dreams, or utopian fantasies. Then again, bodily pleasures and mindless escape may be as good a strategy as any other. T’is well to remember, though, that a life of the senses cannot be entirely divorced from the spiritual, “since,” writes Ruiz, “one is one’s body and memory and little else, and there is no such thing as a separate mind and body.” He makes a good case for passion and sexuality as escapes from History and the self, with a chapter on T. Huxley, Fourier, and de Sade.

Finally, we get the lure of beauty and knowledge. The aesthetic approach and the creative process are ways of “erasing meaninglessness,” of holding at bay, if only temporarily, the horror of routine and the catastrophe of passing time. Ruiz concludes with the work of Keats, Baudelaire, and Rimbaud, all emblematic of art’s inherent contradiction:

While on the one hand most art is an affirmation of life and thus a validation of history; on the other hand the yearning for remembrance and for transcending the flow of time is, above all, an attempt to escape.

The Terror of History reads as a deeply passionate work, personal without conceit, unblinking but never mawkish. It is broad in scope for such a short book, erudite, literary, and beautifully composed.