It took me a long time, but I think I now understand why people of my generation and older feel the need to frame current events in an historical context or precedents, while most of the young
couldn’t care less about what happened ten years ago, let alone centuries back. After living for a
few decades, you get to a point when time seems to be moving quite fast, and it’s humbling to see
that your entire existence so far can be summed up in a paragraph or two which may or may not be
useful to whoever ends up reading the stuff anyhow. I suppose one way to cope with the serenity of
aging is trying to convince yourself that your life and work are really an extension of millenia of
a species striving to accept, adapt to, and improve the human condition through advancing the many
facets of civilization — basically making things more understandable and comfortable for ourselves
and each other while we go about doing whatever it is we are trying to do. And when you do finally
convince yourself of that, history becomes a source of much solace and even a little premonition, so
you end up spending more time there.
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