Jean d'Ormesson (1925–2017)

There is something dispiriting about the march of history. That web which never alters despite an infinite range of motifs and variations: the same struggle for power under ever-different masks; the vain triumphs, the declines and falls; the ever-recurring myths; the straining toward a future that, though it always eludes the grasp, never ceases to exert its pressure and make its demands; the turning wheel which changes yet does not change; the hopes always disappointed, the victories foredoomed to failure - whether the picture they paint of man expresses his greatness or his weakness, we shall never know. Both, probably - and both at the same time. Nothing is more futile than history, and yet history is man himself. Nothing is more accidental, nothing more necessary. Everything could probably have been otherwise. But everything is as it is, and forever.

Death was all around him. He was like an island lashed at on every side by the waves. Death was attacking, the island still stood out for a few moments above the seething breakers, then it was overwhelmed by them and disappeared forever. He was the emperor of nothingness. These sumptuous colors and shapes, all this magnificence, the hymns of the priests, the swords and lances, the plumed helmets, the palaces around the square, the standards stamped with the Tiger and the ensigns surmounted by the Eagle, the thirst for power and the thirst for gold, even the beauty of the gardens and the sky, even the happiness he felt within him on spring mornings, all the impatience of youth, the friendship of men, ambition, anguish, all, including the pomp and circumstance of history, was nothing but illusion, nothing but the mask covering gulfs that held only silence.

"The only way to have clean hands is to not have hands. But we have hands, Philocrates."