Commonplace Book - 11/20/22 - More Wisdom from Chateaubriand

 

“If I were to measure a private life’s calamities against the weight of public events, these calamities would hardly warrant a word in my Memoirs. Who has not lost a friend? Who has not watched him die? Who could not recall a comparable scene of mourning? The observation is just, yet no one has ever chided himself for telling his own tales. Sailors, aboard the ship that transports them, have a family on land who are important to them and whose stories they tell each other. Every man has inside him a world apart – foreign to the general laws and destinies of the centuries. It is, anyway, a mistake to believe that revolutions, famous happenings, and momentous catastrophes are all there is of human greatness. We all, one by one, labor on the chain of history, and it is all of these individual existences that compose the human universe in the eyes of God.” 

--Rene-Jacques de Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, 1800-1815 (1848).