I can’t help but think of history.
Is it the mid-60’s, when violence in this country erupted and eventually led to change at some unimaginable costs?
Is it the comparison that people like to jump to almost immediately at any opportunity? Is it the 1930’s in Germany, when a virtually unknown party found power amidst growing uncertainty in the future and discontent with the state of things, which they wielded into fascism and atrocity?
Is 1789 France, when our modern definitions of left and right where first created, and radical elements on both sides used fervor and panic to exert control (and when one person was so motivated by doomsday invective in the press that she attempted an assassination on a populist totalitarian)?
Or are we at the end? As Gibbon said of Rome, that “all that is human must retrograde if it does not advance,” and we have simply lost the ability to advance?
Joseph Brodsky on the importance of boredom
Boredom is your window on time, on those properties of it one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. In short, it is your window on time’s infinity, which is to say, on your insignificance in it.
[…]
Boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your existence into its perspective, the net result of which is precision and humility. The former, it must be noted, breeds the latter. The more you learn about your own size, the more humble and compassionate you become to your likes, to that dust aswirl in a sunbeam or already immobile atop your table. Ah, how much life went into those flecks! Not from your point of view but from theirs. You are to them what time is to you; that’s why they look so small.
