From the Stray Thought Bin - 'The Heroic Task of Every Generation'

The heroic task of every generation of time-binders (that's us humans): appropriating our inheritance from those who came before us. Every generation does the task to some degree poorly or well. What makes the task heroic?: The stakes are always high and for every new generation, including our own, its particular inheritance is never the same as—indeed is necessarily different than—any that came before.