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Published 21 December 2020
Nothing lasts forever. Except true love as rhapsodised by the poets. Life has taught me that whatever you have to do, do it now and do it with all your might. You must strike while the iron is hot. Because you might never pass through this road again. Today, we are here and tomorrow, we are nowhere. Across the great vicissitudes of time, nations rise and fall like the tidal waves of the ocean. The historian Arnold Toynbee, in his epic study of human history, identifies 26 world civilisations. Less than a dozen survive today.
There are no guarantees for nations or civilisations. Hugh Trevor-Roper, who later became Lord Dacre, was Regius Professor of History at Oxford. He wrote a lot of nonsense, notably his infamous obiter about Africa having no history, and whatever could be thought as its history was “nothing but darkness”. But he also proposed the fascinating concept depicting nations as “invented traditions”. He was perhaps echoing the Swiss historian, Jacob Burckhardt, who famously described the state in renaissance Italy as “a work of art”. By this, he meant that visionaries are always present at the Creation. Burckhardt believed that great states are built with the same vision, skill, panache and passion as Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel or as Mozart composed his great symphonies.