"And each generation, full of itself,/ continues to think/ that it lives at the summit of history" -- so ends Affonso Romano de Sant' Anna's poem "Letter to the Dead" (as posted here last year).
In the same spirit of questioning Modern Exceptionalism, here is a quote by the German author Daniel Kehlmann from his book Measuring the World (a novel using Humboldt and Gauss as main characters, a novel, I might say, about epistemology):
It was both odd and unjust...a real example of the pitiful arbitrariness of existence, that you were born into a particular time and held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not. It gave you an indecent advantage over the past and made you a clown vis-a-vis the future.
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