History Repeats Itself
I am a big fan of Lapham’s Quarterly journal. I was lucky enough to have started reading the publication since its first issue. In it, every quarter, Louis Lapham compiles a timeless conversation on a single topic: love, youth, war, spies… The conversation is timeless because he selects (translated) texts that date back to the early Egyptians, the Romans, and the Greeks. He interposes those with philosophers, teachers, politicians, and captains of industry from every epoch of recorded human history, including modern and contemporary authors. What is most amazing to me in this journal is that humans have been wrestling with the same problems, questions, and issues forever. That is, an ancient text from 200 B.C.E. about governmental corruption still resonates two millennia later and can be responded to by a speech by Ralph Nader, for example.
In a similar vein, I recently ran across an article by Mark Twain wherein he examines the exact similarity between his “Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and that of Athenian origin two thousand years earlier. In both stories, the pride of the owner of the frog brings about their downfall as a stranger fills the frog with stones or buckshot so that it cannot jump. Twain himself borrowed the story when he penned it in 1849, but he concludes that the 19th Century telling of the story had no relation to the early Greeks. He believes that history repeated itself. I do too.
My book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog, borrows no more from Twain than the title and the pride of the frog owner. Also, it’s a kids’ book and holds a gentle message about friendship using a boy and his frog as the story-telling vehicle. As such, it is unlikely to have an exact parallel in an earlier time… but it could. Even as dedicated a student of history as I am, I am continually awed by how similar we futuristic sailors of the planet Earth are to those who came before.
I would love to read your comments about juxtapositions and similarities that you have found between “now” and “then.” I hope you will feel free to write below –>
