/lit/ - Literature

>>13320123
If I may use your error as an example, the arch gives us an interesting image for the arc of history. One may ask whether those in power are creating the arc themselves or merely perceiving its already existing form and attempting to live up to it. In other words, is their own form contained within the arch or do they exist beyond it?

It is a romantic notion to think that man may overpower the course of history, surpass entire societies, even continents, and bend the ideology of an era to his will. But if we take your examples then we see that this is simply not the case, both America and Germany failed miserably in their aims. The arches collapsed upon them due to forces that the building could not withstand. If some of the most powerful nations in history were incapable of determining the will of their era, what does this say of the human ability to escape time and determine a territory beyond its laws?

Your idea is that of our era, that the human is much greater than he seems even in failure. It is a false notion perhaps most easily seen when relating it to Zeno's Paradox of the Tortoise, as if our command of the abstractions of time allow us to overcome it, as if a conception of complex mathematics allows Achilles to easily overcome the tortoise. But all this is doing is rewriting the rules, refusing to see the essence of the problem. Both apart and together Achilles and the Tortoise form One Being, there is only passage within instantiated time - surpassing the criticism lodged by the Aristotelians by prefiguring it.

Similar to this, one may view the arc of history as if looking upon the Roman Colosseum, an entire enclosed elliptical shell with arches built atop one another into an imposing facade. There is linearity within the moment of its construction but in its completion time can be seen as a whole, every arch flowing into another and forming a beautiful and powerful creative dominion - one can then imagine an epoch as a single arch within the entire architecture. And from this viewpoint the single arch stands complete when it is self-supporting, when it is entirely self-contained; the opposing forces of each exerting themselves against neighbouring stone so that the whole may stand against time. Shifting eras and great wars often perform this function, terrible inertias tearing apart whole nations as they are reestablished into entirely new formations.