In Defense of the Same 3/4

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It is a bitter irony that we are so blind to our own paradise. My old friend, the schoolmate, saw my view of the world as a prison. He did not see the irony of his own life: trapped behind bars, restless and hungry, made miserable by his own inability to accept reality.

Some say that we must explode forward, must run headlong, towards an ever accelerating and ever expanding future. This is madness.

I say again: this is madness.

Look to history. Speed was death to our ancestors. Speed was war, when we bred too quickly and ate too rapaciously and then in hunger turned on our neighbors. Speed was risk: a thousand crashed planes and reactor criticalities as we burst the seams of our society. Trying to expand, always expand , twisting like the cancerous man in the hospital. That was the Little Bump, and it pushed us to the brink.

And then we slowed down. We opened our eyes and saw the cliff ahead. We realized that this need to invent and grow and change was the simple the act of an animal, futily throwing itself at the walls of its cage. We found a truth, one that is ancient and profound: there is nothing new under the sun.

There is nothing new under the sun. Even the phrase itself is ancient.

You will say—you, who are still wild-eyed with lust for the &quot;new&quot;, for &quot;adventure&quot;—you will say &quot;But nobody has been beyond our solar system! What undreamt of worlds await!&quot;

And I will say: a million million souls have said the same words before. It is the same, always the same.

Nobody has been beyond the sea's horizon before! And so we sailed there, and found the same seas and same lands there.

Nobody has been through the dark woods before! The same fields laid beyond it.

And so on, down to every fiber of our being. It is all the same. And yet we struggle so, thinking that some new thing will be beyond the next horizon, some escape from the truth we have known for all of our lives: it is the same.