Sunday Firesides: Don’t Hope to Live in Historic Times; Be Historic Yourself

“If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void: ‘Nothing in the paper today,’ we sigh.”

The philosopher Paul Valéry made this observation in 1930, and it remains just as true nearly a century later.

It may seem a strange paradox of human nature that while we cognitively and outwardly wish for safety and peace, we simulta…