Friday, July 10, 2009

WHAT'S NEW UNDER THE SUN

Here's something everyone can agree on. We have more human communication networks going for us since our first grunts and drums. Trouble is, most of the time we're not communicating anything new....!

When you think about it, maybe that's because they're right when they say: There's nothing new under the sun. I'm not sure who "they" are, but it seems they got it right. From cave dweller to astronaut, we're still communicating the very same fundamentals that go with being human -- Help! Look at me! Love me! Stop doing that to me! Here's an idea! Lets try it! Lets try it again!

For those of mighty libraries and even mightier degrees, this may sound foolishly basic. But, then, isn't our human species rather foolishly basic? Dressed in skins or gowns, young and eager or old and cautious, we humanoids haven't changed all that much over the eons. In case you forgot, it's called the Human Condition.

Religions seek to explain it, artists try to capture it, governments work to control it. And yet when it comes to all the important moments in our lives, little or large, our lives have been cloned by cosmic -- or comic? -- forces that simply can't be ignored. To prove this well-worn postulate, check any scrap of evidence at hand. Your daily news reports...your tax returns...your personal letters...your favorite novels...your last wake. Candor and courage impel us to grant this embarrassing yet energizing truth. They're all pretty much the same in our life as in every other life that's ever been or ever will be lived. Be those the lives we know and love, or those we read and study.

Which surprisingly means that meeting Caesar, Charlemagne, Joan of Arc or Albert Einstein in a weekend supermarket line, we'd be able to hold a conversation. Really!

To be perfectly frank, this thought is hardly original. Poets and people, heroes and harebrains, have been saying pretty much the same thing ever since they've clocked enough years to figure out that it's astoundingly true...

....there's nothing really new under the sun, including the sun itself. Which quite properly calls for a soulful: Amen!

2 comments:

  1. While I agree with you that there isn't really anything new under the sun, I don't know if that makes me indifferent or really disappointed. Has our society become so lazy that NO ONE can come up with an original idea....or are supposedly new ideas, just bits and pieces of ones that have already been worked out. I guess you can either look at as the glass half full or half empty....I'm still undecided.

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  2. I guess I'm "undecided" too. As far as IDEAS and EVENTS, the are always new ones. It's when it comes to our basic HUMAN NATURE, that's when I don't think we've changed all that much. Love, hate, dreams, despair, hopes, wars still look pretty much the same. That's one reason they published "The Great Books" series, saying that what these long ago writings -- from Aristotle to Shakespeare -- said then is pretty much still true today.

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