Does History Repeat Itself?

The appearance of a repetitive history — or, as Mark Twain might describe it, a rhyming refrain — may strike witnesses this way only because this is the exclusive manner in which they may individually integrate or relate the new material to already-fastened ideas of the world.

Much as it is difficult to read script not printed upon a page or to accurately interpret intentions, witnesses to history may only perceive and translate information through the lenses of prior experience and the limits of language — of course far removed from relevant time and circumstances in space — which expediently allow them to usefully yet incompletely comprehend, report and personally respond to these events.

Due to the ubiquity of such likeminded, nearly diluted and simplified conceptualizations of the world, we will often thus encounter individuals of similar, incomplete yet thematic dispositions regarding worldly affairs. Our respective incapacities to relate or digest alternative scenarios, foreign customs, and sharper tellings of history, however, remain insufficient to effectively reduce the world’s many characters, various behaviors, and their near-infinite outcomes to practical terms on a timeline. Their many nuances prove unwieldy and, therefore, commonly elude general consideration to yield to the convenient condensation of material which, by nature of superficial description, only appears to resemble everything else that has been sterilized in the same manner for ease of reporting and remembrance.

Ultimately, this may prove that history’s semblance of repetition is nothing more than a function of the popular desire to observe and preserve it that way, removing or adding blemishes where useful, and forgetting, dismissing or editorializing where convenient.

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