In the last act of Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic, Stalker, the titular character utters these arresting words: “When a man thinks of the past, he becomes kinder.” As a historian, I am never not interested when someone is saying something positive about the discipline of turning our minds toward what has come before. What is Stalker communicating here?

For a little context, Stalker follows the journey of three men into The Zone, an area of mysterious power and even more mysterious origins. Due to unexplained loss of life and birth defects, the government has closed the area entirely to both the residents and any visitors. However, rumors of a Room within the zone where one’s greatest wish will come true brings seekers looking to get into The Zone. In Stalker, the lead character sneaks two others—the Professor and the Writer—into The Zone to lead them to the Room.

Their journey is marked by dilapidated beauty (many of Tarkovsky’s and cinematographer Aleksandr Knyazhinskiy’s images are among the most beautiful ever filmed), confusing turns, and occasional conversations that reveal both Professor and Writer as deeply skeptical of the supernatural or alien power that is supposed to be present in The Zone. Their views stand in stark contrast to those of Stalker (he is never given another name), who repeatedly exhorts his charges toward belief and trust in whatever or whomever rules The Zone. The Professor and the Writer, while sometimes scared into grudging respect for whatever is going on in The Zone, are not really inclined to give their trust to this mysterious power.

This tension has been building throughout the film when Stalker points the Professor and the Writer to the past. As the group nears the Room, both men have revealed the depths of their skepticism, which reads to me as deeply modernist, albeit in different ways. The Professor, who works in the sciences, believes in the power of rationality to solve problems. The Writer, who is more connected to poetic truth, but he has looked within himself for that truth and found it wanting. In both cases, these men have thought-patterns that lead them toward dark, deeply pessimistic, and death-oriented ways of being.

Into this context, Stalker exhorts them to look to their past. In the moment, he seems to be encouraging them to think of their personal pasts. But the line lingers, pointing toward a larger and more significant way of conceiving of the past beyond simply the personal. Stalker’s point, it seems to me, is to get out of yourselves in this moment, to find that “other you” from decades ago. Both men suffer from an acute case of solipsism. Part of the beauty of history (personal or otherwise), is that it forces you out of your current moment and into the life experience of someone else somewhere else—even if the someone is you and the somewhere is more or less where you are now. In other words, Stalker is pointing to the reality that the one constant related to time is change. And change, when properly acknowledged as not only inevitable but fundamental to the human experience in the created world, keeps one from hardening and rusting into a useless antique on the verge of being discarded.

So, yeah, maybe looking to the past and noting the changing of the times and appreciating where I (or others) have been and how far I (or they) have come, makes me kinder precisely because it pulls me out of myself and into the lives and circumstances of those who have come before.