Propositions that make sense to me:
1. Our personal and cultural constructions are responses to something that we might as well call reality.
2. Our task, whether as historians, directors, teachers, or just inquiring minds who want to know, is to keep alive a passionate, skeptical inquiry into the relationship between the personal/cultural and reality.
3. The contemporary emphasis on the deconstruction of traditionally accepted hierarchies of meaning is instructive and valuable, but carried to it's logical conclusion is somewhat like Wile E. Coyote finding himself running in mid-air--oops, there's no ground there!
4. Yeats asked how we could tell the dancer from the dance. Today we ask how we can tell the history from the historian. These are variations on what may be THE question--and the variety of answers to that question make up the intellectual and cultural history of our species. Post-modern Balkanization of meaning is having, and will have, sadly predictable results.
5. I lived for five years in Mississippi, most of that time across the street from a military park commemorating the Siege of Vicksburg. If I never see another cannon again I will not feel that my life was therefore less full.
6. I have never watched a complete game of baseball, though I did once have a pet cricket.
I remain, if my personal identity HAS a reality beyond our shared perceptions of it...