Terence, and the Struggle to Matter Today

Hasn’t it all been said — two or three times, or more — already? We hear people use this maxim all the time… the obnoxious notion that nothing is new: that it certainly ain’t worth expressing even once more.

It just ain’t, they say.

It was Terence, actually — the 2200-year-old Roman playwright — who originally dared to knock our human expression so ironically:

Nothing is said that has not been said before.

And I’m beginning to believe it.

Why then do I sit here now, struggling to say something of value in a world where that’s just not quite good enough. A message needs now to be well-timed, properly tagged and optimized for savvy readers — and robots — and in tune with the viral bits of the day (or the week, or the micro-era).

My word!

History’s best minds — most of them — would struggle to matter as much in this creative climate: in the midst of such great sociopolitical media clatter.

Exceptional writing is a twenty-first century afterthought.

Genius is still as magical— for those who can find it out there, well past all that which is prim and popular. Terence would say it’s worth the search, I’m sure. “Fortis fortuna adiuvat,” he once wrote of people and progress…

History’s best minds — most of them— knew why I sit here (and why countless like minds are doing the same, somewhere) now, struggling to say something of value in a world… It is, and it has always been, as Terence was noting:

Fortune favours the brave.