Henry Kissinger died recently. Someone posted this excerpt from his thesis.
When we are young, we encounter great vistas of possibility and wonder. As time goes on, our role inside of these vistas, if we had imagined some such future, changes from roaming a vast landscape running in all directions, to walking a path through a narrow subsection of the world of possibility.
Edward Gibbons, as well, has another quote, on the nature of possibility and the terminus of fate actually realized. Perhaps, this is the time that many of us arrive to now, as Millennials, those born in the Western world from approximately 1980-1996. We are aged now, or getting there, and life is narrowing to exclude certain possibilities. Certainly the world has forsaken much of the bright promise it once held for our societies, in particular for America.
This is a crowded continent now, and as every space becomes filled, both in physical terms and in the exhaustion of notional, conceptual space for dreaming of new worlds, we find ourselves jammed together, perhaps condemned to replay the swan songs of old Europe. Internecine conflict, corruption, insanity in the halls of state power. Perhaps, we will avoid a catastrophe, but whatever happens at this point it will almost certainly be a far cry from utopia as we have imagined it.
However, in the lives of people, or peoples, individuals or cultures, there is a time to revisit those things we once dreamed of. Therefore let this cruddy blog of mine be the chance to revisit, for myself and for you, readers, that we once dreamed of. We can collect our visions of the world as it is, the world that will likely emerge, and what the world once was – compare, commiserate, and then separate for the last time, before we go onto the path that we will walk for the rest of our lives.
