Over, and over, and over, and over again... ignoring history, reinventing the wheel, discovering that an earlier age got there ahead of this one, quoting Santayana and then going ahead and forgetting what you did yesterday anyway.
Josephine Tey wrote a mystery in which her detective is incapacitated, so instead of investigating a current crime, he digs into one of history, inspired by a postcard of a sad, wise face from the National Portrait Gallery.
And at the end of the novel, after much research, much effort, and proving to his own satisfaction that "common knowledge" of the case is, (as common knowledge of anything so often proves to be...,) wrong -- he discovers that this is old news, that the facts were there and uncovered for generations, for anyone who cared to look.
But simple truth has limited hold on the popular imagination, so it is the sizzling, or sometimes merely comfortable, or sometimes just NEW, lie that became and remains common "knowledge."
Are our struggles really different in kind from the struggles that the people of God have always faced?
Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment