Nov 13 History (re-edited)

“I” (whoever I “am”) had written once that the greatest of all minds – not only of their own particular generation, but of all generations – are apt to repudiate the vain frivolity of the times they find themselves in, frivolity which so many of their contemporaries consider vital, monumental, and historical. He does this by condemning its inconsequential goings-on (as well as the personalities involved in those goings-on) with and through their enduring ignorance of and conspicuous silence toward the manifold events that transpire around them. While I cannot speak for Great Ones, I have thus far, among much, neglected any direct or prolonged reflection of the inconsequential happenings of my generation principally as a way to differentiate my own set of values from those of my time so that I might also order and structure my values in a kind of unadulterated hierarchical form which might allow not only my thought but my entire ontological constitution to be exalted above theirs so that I might transcend beyond them toward more a difficult, lasting, and beautiful “truth”. For, “fatal is the thinker who wrongly ascribes lasting and universal importance to his generation” in light of evolving history and the actualization of the God “at work” behind that history; History itself which will punish the thinker who inaccurately emphasizes his own decades simply because they are “his” by relegating his legacy (should he even allow himself to have one) to mere opinion and uninspired reportage.

No, History can only trust the man who begins and maintains his body of work without specific reference to any one thing or word that might definitively ground him too firmly in “the present” with its ego-centrism and personal bias, that which prevents such a one from ever approaching “truth” for it’s “own sake” (if such is even possible) and not merely a means to grant one “more (social) power”. Indeed, only the lofty vantage attained largely through self-ignorance, and even self-denial can ever hope to view history from the wide, broad, and grand enough perspective that it deserves, Its story that the great mind is at all points principally concerned; He who not only amplifies its mountains and identifies its valleys and delineates its shores and runs free upon its plains, but in every way also increases the possibilities of its territory and even shapes its future actualizations by the very words he uses or not, by the very things he perceives or not, actions he takes or not, and by the very care and solemnity he pursues his practice.

Wrong in this, careless in this, he will be wrong and careless in all things and should, therefore, not be trusted at all by anyone.

Such are the stakes and lethal the missteps and so high the price yet everlasting the spiritual reward.

…

For both Great Men and the times they inhabit rarely recognize themselves as, for, who, and what they truly “are”, which is to say, how they “archetypically” or “objectively” are, specifically as they are “are-ing,” as they are to the other yet inconsequential, innocuous, trivial, stupid, banal, and largely invisible, the emergence of the one from the harmless state of forgetfulness which cannot be initiated without the commensurate emergence of the other from much the same state, History which cannot become “Itself” – which is to say, worthy of remembrance as History – without its great men and minds to give form and actual substance to its monuments and milestones that, more than anything, supplying history with common and easily identifiable points of reference by which it and its inhabitants might teleologically orient themselves around so as to find a suitable and enduring narrative structure to existentially actualize their continued unfoldment.