Hegel

"Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag and smile boy that's the style"

Historical consciousness and connections are like one of those adapters you buy to use electric devices in a foreign country. You're crossing borders as well as time and space. A wide swafh of relationships can resemble the overloaded plugs that may have populated the wall sockets in your grandparents' apartment--and which your parents were always warning you about when you were a kid. Intellectual history itself bears some degree of resemblance to a family tree in which distant cousins have apparently had incestuous relationships. Strange bedfellows is a term used to describe those who find themselves on the same side of the fence as apparent adversaries (as is the case with feminists and fundamentalists when it comes to pornography). Hegel proposed the famous thesis, antithesis, synthesis that became the basis for "dialectical materialism." Would that history could be instantiated in such a clear and blameless way!

Listen to "Tears of the Clown" by Smokey Robinson.

and read "Why Big German Words Like Vergangenbangenheit Carry Weight" by Francis Levy, HuffPost