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Tantra Lake, Boulder, CO : Dec. 9, 2005

 

The effort which people put up to avoid thinking might almost enable them to think and to have some ideas. But having ideas produce anxiety and malaise and runs counter to the deepest instincts of human nature, which loves symmetry, repetition, and routine. Mine certainly does, and to such a degree that I get sick of them, and then notice that proclivity in others and criticise it.

One would expect people to remember the past and to imagine the future. But in fact, when discoursing or writing about history, they imagine it in terms of their own experience, and when trying to gauge the future they cite supposed analogies from the past: till, by a double process of repetition, they imagine the past and remember the future.

It is a mistake to suppose that people think: they wobble with the brain, and sometimes the brain does not wobble.

Lewis Namier: Symmetry and repetition (1941), in The Oxford Book of Essays, Oxford University Press, 1991.

 
 

 
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