I did not place Epictetus in chains
and by his account only
education truly freed him.
You are not responsible for
the inequities of the ancients
although all profit from them
in clasping causal links that last
from the savannah to the solar city;
we can no more slip the shackles
of our past than we are
ennobled by the suffering of
sickly bodies stacked in ship-holds or
infants snatched suckling from the breast-
those thirty pieces of silver
compound in interest over centuries
transmuting into the wine dark sea
in which we breathe
contend, consume, and cease in:
Our inheritance of environment.
So seek the sandy shore
heave yourself gawping from the tempest
writhing and fish-eyed to dry
in the communal warmth of the noon sun.
This lies within our horizon
proof against the slavery of the soul
to drink good wine both white and brown
for the ignorant and the connoisseur
find fault in the foreign vintage
insensate and ill educated that
opinions and aversions, impulses and desires
are the only chattel we honestly own.
History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations. ~James Baldwin