I’VE been feeling very adult lately, just having finished reading my very first, cover-to-cover, non-required, non-fiction history book—all within less than a week.

This sense of adulthood, of course, comes from a criteria a friend of mine once told regarding the natural stages of reading: from fairy tales and picture-story books in childhood, to the usually gender-specific books of adolescence: from on one end, Sweet Valley High, Mills and Boon, and whatever variant of the romance novel is popular these days (Twilight perhaps?) and on the other end, the fantasy and sci-fi that are usually the common stock of the male adolescent imagination. (These days the distinctions between male and female reading preferences, of course, are no longer as dead set.) Then, they say, one “graduates” to more serious fiction (literary perhaps, espionage maybe?). Not always better, but definitely thicker.

There is the possibility, of course, that one stops reading altogether! Which for many people probably happens in their twenties. When school stops, and the “adult world” is said to come knocking. And the “living” is bound to become more interesting (or purported more “practical”) than the “reading”, then the book stops there, and the pages stop turning.

And it certainly doesn’t help that one doesn’t belong to what one may call a “reading culture”, and the only contexts of reading are for tests, or reviewing for exams, and one faces the word-filled page with the built-in and often un-pleasurable demand for memorizing. Before one knows it, one has given up on books.

If one manages, however, to survive this fateful and seemingly terminal stage, then it’s said that one moves on to reading what’s general categorized as nonfiction: biographies of famous people, literary essays by well-known writers, and in some cases, history books.

In my case, I’ve triumphantly just finished Resil Mojares’ book The War against the Americans: Resistance and Collaboration in Cebu 1899-1906. Triumphantly, I say, because it’s the first time I’ve read a history book cover to cover, chapter by chapter, footnotes and all and more importantly completely unrequired.

For to read history outside of the context of quizzes and seatworks, homeworks and exams, is perhaps to finally, finally enjoy it. Stripped of the burden of tests and memorizations, dates and names, one begins to finally see history as a story being told that we’re all a part of. Reading about the drawn out conflict between Cebuanos and the Americans at the turn of the twentieth century, one begins to see how events more than a hundred years ago continue to shape the mindsets of our present generation. Street names become more than floating signifiers of a forgotten past. Maxilom becomes more than a place, but the name of a general that resisted the American occupation for more than four years. Climaco and Lorrete become more than the family names of some friends we may know but the living and breathing participants of a story begun a hundred years ago. Sogod becomes more than just a town after we read that it was razed to the ground during the war.

(And all because of a young lieutenant’s baseless fear of being attacked--- a whole town and its history being the price of a needless paranoia.)

In the end, history becomes less an impersonal collection of dates and names, but a way of seeing the world we live in. As Mojares explains in another essay of his, perhaps history is a kind of consciousness really: a way of understanding Space and Character (who occupies what, who lives where, what demarcations we insist to draw on fields and hills), but also of understanding Time (the way it repeats and does not ever repeat itself, how it rests ultimately on the fate of memory, and more often forgetfulness).

To read history is to realize that personal stories (individual or familial) are inextricably tied to narratives that are grander, wider, more complicated than we think they are.

That the early death of a long-lost grand uncle be tied to an epidemic that left its scar on a hundred others. That the loss of a house be due to the helpless invasion of, (or even collaboration) of a group of people. It is to see things “from afar”, not for the sake of indifference or self-preservation but for the sake of the perspective it brings: to see neither complete innocence or complete guilt, not black or white, but the grey space of history and time, but also imagination, where no criminal is wholly evil, and no hero is ever untainted with someone else’s blood.

Is this complicated and wonderful grayness, the color of growing up?