It is wonderful to be home, and to be around people who think in a similar way about the world as I do, though I find myself departing from my parents' ideas much less than when I started college. The intellectual environment at New College can be very stifling, people take themselves and their ideas a little too seriously sometimes. It begins to rub off after a while, but I needed a little cleansing by being home.

My education in history is bringing me to an altogether different way of thinking and a different view of the world than I began with. I'm a little more conservative, and I view the external world in the context of time. The world changes at its own pace, and many traits remain constant, and there is little to do about it. It's more laissez-faire than I used to be.

History is a wonderful teacher. It's difficult to explain to those who are uninitiated into it, but I would guess that the best quote I can think of is this: "history is philosophy teaching by example."

That's the seventeenth-century English jurist Lord Bolingbroke. Something tells me his name is a little obscure outside historical circles.

But, anyway, my point is, history is capable of showing, to those who look for it, the vanity and futility of spending life militantly lobbying for drastic social change, or worrying that society is changing for the worse and going downhill. Generally speaking, society changes in little unnoticeable increments, and no one ever really sees social decay, because the decay happens so slowly that one lifetime isn't long enough to witness any real change.

So for those of you who worry that everything is going to hell: don't.

~Halcyondream~

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