Dreams (but not mine, this time)
I added something to "Existence and Uniqueness" which paraphrases the Somnium Scipionis and something by Karl Barth. Amusingly enough, when I searched for "manare nihil" on Google, the very first match was a web page I myself wrote in high school, which provided exactly the quotation I was looking for.
There's a famous line by Linus Torvalds about how he doesn't make backups, he just posts important things on the Internet and lets everybody else make copies for him. Then he's certain to be able to find them again when he needs them.
The passage is VI, 20 in the de Re Publica:
Tum Africanus: "Sentio," inquit, "te sedem etiam nunc hominum ac domum contemplari; quae si tibi parva, ut est, ita videtur, haec caelestia semper spectato, illa humana contemnito! Tu enim quam celebritatem sermonis hominum aut quam expetendam consequi gloriam potes? Vides habitari in terra raris et angustis in locis et in ipsis quasi maculis, ubi habitatur, vastas solitudines interiectas eosque, qui incolunt terram, non modo interruptos ita esse, ut nihil inter ipsos ab aliis ad alios manare possit, sed partim obliquos, partim transversos, partim etiam adversos stare vobis; a quibus expectare gloriam certe nullam potestis."
Three comments:
- This is really depressing.
- It's not clear that it's less true today than it was in Cicero's time.
- It's complete nonsense to say that Columbus was the first person to believe that the Earth was round. Cicero knew that the Earth was round, half a century before Jesus. (And Eratosthenes of Cyrene not only knew that but had measured its circumference more than a century before that.)
