Redoubling your effort after you've forgotten your aim...

By stating the narrowness of the limits of action, is one denying the role of the individual in history? I think not. One may only have the choice between striking two or three blows: the question arises: will one be able to strike them at all? To strike them effectively? To do so in the knowledge that only this range of choices is open to one? I would conclude with the paradox that the true man of action is he who can measure most nearly the constraints upon him, who chooses to remain within them and even to take advantage of the weight of the inevitable, exerting his own pressure in the same direction. All efforts against the prevailing tide of history -- which is not always obvious -- are doomed to failure... So when I think of the individual, I am always inclined to see him imprisoned within a destiny in which he himself has little hand, fixed in a landscape in which the infinite perspectives of the long term stretch into the distance both behind him and before. In the historical analysis ... the long run always wins in the end.

-- Fernand Braudel

Here I am at the beginning. Am I going against the tide of history?