I brought a long book to read while I was in Paris.
I've been reading it in my down time here.
Late last night I was awake, so I watched a movie on my iPhone.
The book is Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety.
The movie was The Grapes of Wrath.
I saw the movie when I was quite young.
I read the book when I was substantially younger than I am now.
In both cases, the works were of great enough meaning and substantial enough quality, that they have always been on my "get back to someday" list.
So, on this trip I have gotten back to them.
I had either forgotten, or more likely totally missed, what both of these brilliant works are about.
And that's because, until 2016 and since, I had never seen certain things before.
Or they had been so buried in the trappings of what I have always thought of as "my life" that I had just missed them.
How utterly repetitive is history, and how utterly fragile are its fleeting improvements of human condition.
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