"No new thing under the sun"

From Anecdotal Evidence yesterday:

“The past has always been more interesting to me than the future, just as I have found pessimists more amusing than optimists and failures more attractive than successes. I do not say that my preferences are based upon universal principles or that everyone should share them; in any case I should not want to live in a world of mental clones of myself, even if it were possible. I merely describe my own preferences as they happen to be.”

What Theodore Dalrymple describes is neither an ironclad law of existence, a wallow in sentimentality nor an affliction of the elderly. It’s common sense, a recognition of reality. The future is fiction. It is the home turf of utopians and other schemers, whose visions have the solidity of steam; that is, hot air. The past is where we come from. It made us. As a corollary to Ecclesiastes 1:9, C.H. Sisson writes in his essay “Natural History”: “It is an absurdity to try to be original. You might as well try to be beautiful or intelligent.

Patrick Kurp, "More Interesting to Me Than the Future," Anecdotal Evidence, July 29, 2014.