The pale hands of the past

Occasionally the antiquity of political futility raises the bigger spectre of human futility, perhaps the most dismal spectre of all. Like a wagging finger reaching out from the past, it says “you haven’t learned anything.”


The pale hands of the past had reached out and gathered us together again.

Thorne Smith – Dream’s End (1927)


Best wave those hands away and move on, but they won't be waved away –


Monferrand, the strong-handed man of government, who undertook to bury the African Railways scandal by bringing about a Commission of Inquiry, all the strings of which would be pulled by himself.

Emile Zola - Paris (1898)