close and intimate with paulie ricoeur

"Look at us, library rats turned into walking encyclopedias; individuals, void of any creative instinct, reduced to wearing masks, born with grey hairs. Historians, charged to guard history, have become eunuchs and history a harem which they oversee. It is no longer the eternal feminine that draws us upward – as in the closing verses of Goethe’s Faust – but the eternal objective, celebrated by our historical education and culture…the genuine historian must have the strength to recast the well known into something never heard before and to proclaim the general so simply and profoundly that one overlooks its simplicity because of its profundity and its profundity because of its simplicity. It is this strength that makes all the difference between master and slave." -Paul Ricoeur in “Towards a Hermeneutics of Historical Consciousness”