the senseless repetitions of history were all for naught if you find meaning in this

[rokkitz]

"Like characters in a story that keeps changing, we find ourselves playing roles that others appear to have invented for us, in plots whose roots and consequences escape us. We declare ourselves Roman or Carthaginian, but our notion of what Rome and Carthage are is either too restricted to too ambitious to be useful beyond the shorthand of a label. Vague and heated patriotic feelings, murky reasons of emotion and faith, lead us to defend or attack a border or a banner whose shape and colour keep shifting, and even when declaring allegiance to one place, we seem to be always moving away from it, toward a nostalgic image of what we believe that place once was or might one day be. Nationalities, ethnicities, tribal, and religious filiations imply geographical and political definitions of some kind, and yet, partly because of our nomad nature and partly due to the fluctuations of history, our geography is less grounded in a physical than in a phantom landscape. Home is always an imaginary place." - The Screens of Hal, The City of Words, Alberto Manguel

“That history should have imitated history was already sufficiently marvelous; that history should imitate literature is inconceivable.” - Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, Jorge Luis Borges