(3 of 3)
Public acts fall into several categories: 1) the tragic dullness of missed opportunity—for example, British and German general staffs were mired for years in the Western Front's stalemate of trench warfare; 2) the inconclusive—Wallace Warfield Simpson separated Edward VIII from his crown, but the event belonged more to the history of celebrity than to that of power; 3) magnificent failure—Imre Nagy, for example, in 1956 tried to withdraw Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and then discovered the brutal insistence of things in the Soviet tanks that arrived to iron out his impulse; 4) the satanic leap—what inspiration instructed Hitler that he might conquer Europe and destroy 6 million Jews?
Proudhon once wrote of the "fecundity of the unexpected." That is the infinitely various system of alternatives, within which civilization works itself out. The greatest of human gifts may be the talent for improvisation, the ability to evaluate a situation and then to devise some entirely new way of dealing with it. Without that gift, history would be nothing more than a brutal repetition. —Lance Morrow