Everything Old is New Again I

I have a confession to make: I’m fascinated by history. It’s true – who would lie about such a thing? “But Ray,” you say, “if you’re so fascinated by history, why aren’t you professing it at some university or other, why haven’t I heard of you, why don’t you have all kinds of fancy-pants letters after your name?” I have a second confession to make: I’m pretty much a lazy man. Come to think of it, lazy may not be the correct word here; what I’m not though, is dedicated and detailed enough to follow through and work like hell to get such a designation. And that’s also why I’m not a doctor; in fact, I like to think they're the only reasons I’m not a doctor – who wants a doctor who doesn’t follow through, who doesn’t pay attention to detail? I don’t. I’m glad I have two doctors who pay attention to detail and follow through. I will say that I make a lousy patient as I don’t always take the medication I need to take when I have to take it. It’s true – it’s the height of scandalous and irresponsible behaviour. It's playing with fire. That’s a story for other days, I think. But I do wonder why I don’t have paparazzi following me around for such heretical behaviour…

Ahem. But I do adore history. Here’s a quote that spells it out splendidly: “The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today. Yet they were once as real as we, and we shall tomorrow be shadows like them...The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cock-crow.” British historian George Macaulay Trevelyan, CBE, OM, himself now a ghost, came up with this echo of thoughts I never knew I had until I read it.

Now do you see what dedication and attention to detail gets you? It gets you quoted and lauded and people nodding their heads because you’ve said something that seems like an echo of their own thoughts, only they hadn’t heard the echo until just when you said what you said. That’s the hilltop where dedication and attention to detail brings you – a hilltop with a view, a place with perspective, a mount from which to sermon.

And so what I’m going to do here on a regular basis is present quotes that boggle me for their currency, despite being uttered, or in some cases attributed, to those long gone, both famous and infamous. We have a great degree of hubris these days, thinking that what we think today is new, that our issues are new, that we are dealing with evils never before seen, challenges never before dreamed, problems never before solved. It’s rubbish, you know, utter rot. Do you know London, England, had a population of 860,000 in its first census in 1801? Some folks will know that, or at least recognize having heard that before. Did you know ancient Rome had a population of 1,000,000 in the second century AD? This says to me, and others, that the ancient Romans knew a thing or two about city planning and city management. A number of city councils worldwide should be appropriately humbled I should think.

That’s it for now. Carry on there, citizen. We all have other things to do - ghosthood looms for us all.