Do you want to be a god? Do you want to think like a god? Do you want to see the world as gods do? Then study history. Historians are gods. They watch the march of centuries from their unassailable perch, untouched by human drama. They don’t hunger in famine, or thirst in drought. They sip their coffee while millions die and their bodies rot in the sun. This human calamity is notable and interesting, but it does not touch the historian. Historians watch empires rise and fall. The most ruthless, bloodthirsty tyrant is wiped off the face of the earth with the flick of a finger and the soft brush of a turning page. Religious ecstasy, revelation and persecution unfold before their analytic gaze. Here one day is a revered saint. Later, someone digs up his saintly bones and burns them for some heretical affront. The historian takes this all in with equanimity. He is above it. Generations unfold under his gaze, cultures evolve and devolve. He sees the connections, the cause and effect, the deeper principle which the puny, time-bound human actors cannot grasp. It all unfolds as if in a stop-motion film for the historian. Every year is millisecond. The historian, like a god, sees the silliness and trivialities that drive entire civilizations. He may smile, in an understanding and patronizing way, at the ignorance and pettiness of these small creatures who are doing, perhaps, the best they can with the limited resources and knowledge they have at their disposal. The smallness of human aspirations, the futility of human glory. All this, sitting in his easy chair with a book, as though gazing down from heaven. And the historian knows what is going to happen next. Like all gods, he knows the future. But is he really that safe? Sometimes history reaches out, Tower of Babble like, Prometheus like, to shake the foundations of his heaven. As when the words of some ancient sage echo up through the ages and bring strong boots up the stairs and insistent knocks on the door, and guns and wrath and a firing squad. The historian, like all gods, is human after all.