Should Have/Could Have/Would Have/If Only

In the Man Booker prize-winning short novel, "The Sense of an Ending," by Julian Barnes, there appears the following perceptive answer by a brilliant student to the question, "What is History?" The student quotes, "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation."

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History at best, therefore, is always somewhat less than a certainty.

A galactic truth, uncertainly, like '42', (an answer to life, the universe, and everything.)*


*Wikipee Douglas Adams for even more uncertainty.