Wednesday, July 12, 2017

If the path before you is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.

From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual” by Arnold Kunst
Looking back over his 91 years just before his death, Churchill might very well have seen his life as an elongated, multifaceted failure – the evidence that way seemed overwhelming. Consider the following: the Empire he was born into and championed unabashedly was emasculated by two world wars into that toothless media construct known as the British Commonwealth; when out of power he issued cries to an unresponsive England about fascism in the thirties; when out of power he issued cries to an unresponsive England about communism in the fifties. And how does any man comfortably accustomed to wielding massive power adjust to being shunted off like some once-crucial but archaic steam engine to a back-water world of painting and writing? How could he possibly settle for the banality of writing history after the ultimate high of having made history?

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