Time Capsule #183
Fātum.
Dear reader,
Another newsletter I am looking forward to writing!
We judge others by their worst moments; ourselves by our best intentions.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky
✏️ Accepting One’s Destiny
To each there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered the chance to do a very special thing, unique to them and fitted to their talents. What a tragedy if that moment finds them unprepared or unqualified for that which could have been their finest hour.
Winston Churchill
It is not fashionable to speak of divine will, so I won’t speak of it. I will instead speak of destiny: that ultimate, pre-ordained, highest high that is set out just in reach for every man and woman. The task is to uncover your destiny in a way that is distinctly yours.
Robert Greene, the author of Mastery, and many other good books, speaks about his own journey in a way that seems like fate to me. For many years he was a disgruntled and wandering writer in various industries that did not suit him, until in his late 30s, he had a conversation with a random publisher, Joost Elffers, who would fall in love with his idea about a book about power and would become his patron. He would write the 48 Laws of Power, and the rest is history. But in reminiscing about this story he does not discount those many years of tribulation and outwardly apparent failure that he encountered. He appreciates what it gave him — in working in journalism he learned to write with tight deadlines, in working in Hollywood he experienced the good and bad of power himself. All these experiences prepared him for the moment when his opportunity would come. This is the task that is placed before all of us: to continually hone our talents, to distinguish ourselves such that, when we are tapped on the shoulder and asked to play our part in the most special and culminating fashion, we, like a good general, find ourselves ready to seize the moment.
Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit.
Man proposes, but God disposes.
💡 Food for Thought
The best get rich quick scheme is investing in yourself.
🔗 Sunday Best
Marc Bloch: Intellectual and Resistance Fighter
His two volume work on feudal society is a classic. I am currently reading his book “The Historian’s Craft”.
The video is en français, but there is an English version also.
Between 1939 and 1944, Marc Bloch lived through one of the darkest periods in French history. A renowned historian, mobilized at over 50 years old and a witness to the 1940 defeat, he also suffered the exclusion imposed by the anti-Semitic laws of Vichy, which effectively amounted to a “civic death.” But Bloch never ceased to think or act. In Strange Defeat, he lucidly analyzes the causes of France’s collapse. He then joined the Resistance, true to one principle: to understand in order to act. He was ultimately arrested, tortured in Montluc prison, and executed in June 1944. As he is interred in the Panthéon, Storiavoce dedicates two programs to him. After discussing her historiographical contributions with Florian Mazel, Aya Aglan reflects on the last years of her life.
All my life I have sacrificed everything — comfort, self-interest, happiness — to my destiny.
—Napoleon Bonaparte
Yours Truly,
AT