Self as the Endpoint of History
James Atlas:
We think of ourselves not as located in a continuum, part of an ever-evolving world, but as its endpoint. All of human history has been leading up to us. It’s hard — impossible — to grasp that we, too, will seem quaint to the generations that follow us, our clothes strange, our images fixed in a remote moment in time.
My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor’s Tale, p. 45