Word: palimpsestic
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...history is more real for being less obvious. It isn't so much a story about 1963 as it is a palimpsest of the years of history that preceded it, all of which shape the future and private lives. (The JFK assassination is deftly foreshadowed by the date on a wedding invitation...
...than tie these four groups' tales together into a standard history of what became known as the Camp Grant Massacre - one of the most brutal and sensational acts in the American Southwest of the late 19th century - Jacoby breaks them out separately, to better unpack what he calls the "palimpsest of many stories" surrounding the massacre. The goal is to add nuance to the accepted narratives of the American frontier as cowboy vs. Indian, good vs. bad, Manifest Destiny vs. native Americans' ancient claim to the land...
...intelligent, highbrow, allusive and unflinching in its probing of the question, "What relation does the individual have to history?" It is equally intransigent with its oblique, sometimes scathing answers. A book such as this, so preternaturally attuned to listening to "the patient rage of history," is a marvelously layered palimpsest...
Keep in mind too that for some time one of the key words in design has been palimpsest. It originally referred to a manuscript or parchment that has been written on more than once, so that the earlier writing has been scraped away but still sometimes remains faintly visible. Translated into design terms, palimpsest stands for the idea that, given a chance, the history of a place can and will rise from its grave. It's the notion, for instance, behind a persistent argument in Berlin, where architects, city planners and ordinary citizens periodically squabble over how much...
...scratch--hey, that's how we did it, right? Wipe the slate clean and reprogram the patient? But as Joel discovers in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it's not quite that simple: however much you wipe and wipe that slate--out, damned spot!--something, some mysterious, unerasable palimpsest, remains behind...