No matter how far back we turn the pages of history, we find that human beings have remained essentially the same over the centuries. Though each generation has felt itself to be unique in some way, the sum of all these differences has not changed or evolved us as individuals any more than putting on a new shirt changes our blood type. Throughout the centuries we have loved and hated for the same reasons, been driven by the same lusts, feared the same unknowns and aspired to the same truths.
There have been a few in every generation who have recognized the common threads of humanity that run through the historical tapestry; fewer who recognized that these commonalities not only bridge the centuries, but they bind us together in the present as well. Today we have a clearer view of more history than any generation before us, but we still suffer the same prejudices, still fear what we do not understand and often hate what we fear.
The Anasazi cliff dweller of 500 AD and the urban cliff dweller in today’s megalopolis both share the same range of human possibilities. Both love their children and wish for them a better future. Both see themselves as part of something larger than the individual. Both attempt to peer across the gulf between life and afterlife for some sign of God, some promise of hope.
Across the years we all share the same strengths and weaknesses of character that allow the wide range of human conditions between sheep and goats, grasshoppers and ants, saints and sinners. Whether we prefer Shakespeare or Sun Tzu, study the Hindu, the Hopi or the Hapsburgs, we hear the same stories and see the same archetypes. Some generations learn from the past and build on what has gone before, while some, through circumstance or bad judgment, become rubble for the building blocks of future construction. Civilizations rise and civilizations fall in patterns that, if they do not exactly repeat, very often rhyme.
I often look to the ancient Romans for lessons of history. For good or for ill, we resemble them in many ways. Rome began humbly and grew into a great republic. The reins of the republic were seized by greedy hands grasping for empire and the seeds of Rome’s destruction were planted along the imperial road to world power. As Roman military and political power concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, Rome prospered or declined according to the vagaries of personality bound to a long succession of despots. As it is with our own dear nation, Rome was cursed with some of the most corrupt, and incompetent leadership of all time.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born in 3 BC and lived during a time when Rome
Seneca the playwright touched on themes that are as alive today as they were 2000 years ago. Seneca the philosopher wrote extensively on a wide range of topics, but the power of his intellect shines brightly on his discourses on the intents and purposes of life itself. The success of his efforts to illuminate life can perhaps best be judged by the bravery and sobriety with which he faced his own imminent demise when his life, like so many others, was also made forfeit by the madness of Nero.
I leave you this week with an excerpt from Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life.” Though it was written 2000 years ago, it mirrors our own lives as clearly as if it had been written this morning.
“Why do we complain of Nature? She has shown herself kindly; life, if you know how to use it, is long. But one man is possessed by an avarice that is insatiable, another by a toilsome devotion to tasks that are useless; one man is besotted with wine, another is paralyzed by sloth; one man is exhausted by an ambition that always hangs upon the decision of others, another, driven on by the greed of the trader, is led over all lands and all seas by the hope of gain; some are tormented by a passion for war and are always either bent upon inflicting danger upon others or concerned about their own; some there are who are worn out by voluntary servitude in a thankless attendance upon the great; many are kept busy either in the pursuit of other men's fortune or in complaining of their own; many, following no fixed aim, shifting and inconstant and dissatisfied, are plunged by their fickleness into plans that are ever new; some have no fixed principle by which to direct their course, but Fate takes them unawares while they loll and yawn—so surely does it happen that I cannot doubt the truth of that utterance which the greatest of poets delivered with all the seeming of an oracle: ‘The part of life we really live is small.’ For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.”
