When events do not make sense or are such as sense cannot untie,(1) an option is to forget all about them – the head-in-the-sand solution. Another is to remember that man is but a quintessence of dust (2) and often, therefore, not even worth the dust that the rude wind blows in his face. (3)
Yet another option is an attempt at interpretation, with emphasis on ‘attempt’ and limits on ‘interpretation.” In the instance, the events in question are: one, the claim – by the Western signatories of the so-called “Minsk Agreements” on Ukraine in 2014 – that they did not intend to respect them. And two, that the commitment by the USA to Gorbachev in 1989 not to expand NATO Eastward was invalid for not having been set in writing.
Comparisons are often like bikinis, what they reveal is suggestive, what they conceal is vital. The principle equally applies when comparing the history of nations, as implied in the title, which echoes Gibbon’s 6-book, monumental “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”.
All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity, (1) and from this point of view Gorbachev’s life is no different. Especially when equally remembering that all the world is a stage and all men and women merely players (2).
Does art imitate nature or is nature herself inherently artistic? The debate has engaged the minds and pens of many critics and philosophers. But, given that comedy is equally a form of art, when man becomes unintentionally comic, is his comicity attributable to art or nature?
Words being arbitrary, they owe their power to association, and have the influence which custom has given them – for language is the dress of thought. Therefore on hearing the words “Democracy in America,” some will think of Alexis de Tocqueville’s book by the same title. Others, not having read the book (an enterprise of no mean feat), will think that it took a Frenchman to appreciate American democracy, as it existed nowhere else.
The mythical average citizen probably believes that the universe is under the perpetual superintendence of uncontrollable forces. And that the hallucinating social changes currently occurring – and of which he is sometimes the victim – are akin to a force of nature.
An Eastern monarch, of whom we know the existence but not the name, kept an officer in his house whose employment it was to remind him of his mortality, by calling out every morning at a stated hour, “Remember prince that thou shalt die.
“One, no-one, one hundred thousand” is the title of a novel by Italian author Luigi Pirandello.
Francois Mitterrand, the longest serving president of France (1981-1985), not long before he died (1996), made this quite extraordinary statement:
In about 50 BC the Latin poet Publilius Syrus said, “By knowing nothing, life is most delightful” (In nil sapiendo vita iucundissima est.) And in 1788 English poet Thomas Gray rendered the idea in English, “Where Ignorance is Bliss, It is Folly to be Wise.”