Plagiarism

The greatest plagiariser in history has been History itself. The universe may be endless but it is experiencing a creative crisis. Unable to write a new chapter down, it rehashes bits and bobs that weren’t great to begin with.

Some of us have had an intuition of the great Recycling. It used to go by the name of the Myth of the Eternal Return. Not everyone was convinced. Dasein was slumbering in age-old pyjamas. Some took a shot with ennui, it worked for a while but then that too was exposed for the plagiarism it really was.

It’s becoming harder and harder to find new words to describe new things. So we retrofit our eyes for repetition.

There are days when I think that the chroniclers of the Middle Ages got it right. History is a compilation of existing material, pasted ribbons of recollection finding their way into new tomes. Is anything really new? Is anything really old? Each new sentence fills the footprint of old treks. And yet we believe.

Copyright laws don’t extend to the workings of Being. I blame the novelty bias, of which we are all guilty.

In the junk yard of heaped days and nights, we are all shopping for new trinkets.