People can justify almost anything. That's why history keeps repeating itself.
from something I read
A commonplace book: an old-fashioned literary diary for recording interesting items from reading you've done. I use mine to record snippets from reading, conversation and life in general. (The early 2003 entries are from a period some years ago -- before the blog age -- when I tried an online commonplace book as a straight web page.)
We think time travels forward, marches on in a straight line, and so we hurry alongside it to keep up. Hurry, hurry, mustn’t fall behind. But it doesn’t, you see. Time just swirls around us. Everything is always present. The things we’ve done, the people we’ve loved, the people we’ve hurt, they’re all still here.... The lie of time. Everything I’ve done and everything I’ve been is present in the same place. But we still think the thing that has just happened, or is about to happen, we think that’s the most important thing. My memories aren’t memories, my present isn’t present, it’s all the same thing.
Richard Osman, The Last Devil To Die
Man is cruelly wasteful of life when his own safety is endangered and he is sheltered by impunity, and little mercy is to be expected from him when he feels the sting of the reptile and is conscious of the power to destroy.
Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
Every act has consequences that change that world in some way, no matter how modest, and those actions will go on changing the world for millennia after we are gone. But to remember the details of every action is to invite madness, to paralyze our brains and our communities with memory.
Gavin Francis, The Dream of Forgetfulness (NYRB, March 9, 2023)
Our history is as much a product of torsion and stress as it is of unilinear drive. It is amusing that at any given point of time we haven't the slightest idea of what is happening to us. The present wars and ideological changes of nervousness and fighting seem to have direction, but in a hundred years it is more than possible it will be seen that the direction was quite different from the one we supposed.The limitation of the seeing point in time, as well as in space, is a warping lens.
[W]e didn't do much to alter the course of human history, did we?' said Philip. 'As one old spy to another, I reckon I'd have been more use running a boys' club. Don't know what you feel.'
We must not expect to find reason anywhere in Nature, but only the evidence of will!
Pliny the Elder, Natural History
American culture in this early period [the 17th and early 18th Centuries] becomes most fully comprehensible when seen as the exotic far western periphery, a marchland, of the metropolitan European culture system.
This whole world ... was a borderland, a part of the expanding periphery of Britain's core culture; and its inner quality derived from that fact. Like the Welsh borderland two hundred years earlier, like the Scottish middle marches a century earlier, like Ireland and the Caribbean islands in the colonists' own time, and like Australia later, the mainland North American colonies formed a typically disordered border country in which ... "violence [was] a way of life." Concentrating, as American historians have done, on the origins of a later American civilization, and hence viewing the colonial world as a frontier -- that is, as an advance, as a forward and outward-looking, future-anticipating progress toward what we know eventuated, instead of as a periphery, a ragged outer margin of a central world, a regressive, backward-looking diminishment of metropolitan accomplishment --looking at the colonies in this anachronistic way, one tends to minimize the primitiveness and violence, the bizarre, quite literally outlandish quality of life in this far-distant outback of late seventeenth-century Britain.
Partly this wildness, extravagance, and disorder were simply the products of the inescapable difficulties of maintaining a high European civilization in an undeveloped environment. Partly, too, they were products of the hostility that developed between the Europeans and the native peoples. But in large part, too, they were products of the common European, and indeed British, conception of America as an uncivil place on the distant margins of civilization -- a place where the ordinary restraints of civility could be abandoned in pell-mell exploitation, a remote place where recognized enemies and pariahs of society -- heretics, criminals, paupers--could safely be deposited, their contamination sealed off by three thousand miles of ocean, and where putatively inferior specimens of humanity, blacks and Indians, could be reduced to subhuman statuses, worked like animals, and denied the most elemental benefits of law and religion, those fragile integuments which even in England could barely contain the savagery of life.... This mingling of primitivism and civilization, however transitory stage by stage, was an essential part of early American culture, and we must struggle to comprehend it.
What did it mean to Jefferson, slave owner and philosophe, that he grew up in this far western borderland world of Britain, looking out from Queen Anne rooms of spare elegance onto a wild, uncultivated land? We can only grope to understand.
If studying history mainly makes you feel happy and proud, you probably aren’t really studying history.
Quoted without attribution by Fara Dabhoiwala in the New York Review (July 1, 2021)