If you read history, you know you experience this feeling.
Ellipsism
n. sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out, that you’ll dutifully pass on the joke of being alive without ever learning the punchline—the name of the beneficiary of all human struggle, the sum of the final payout of every investment ever made in the future—which may not suit your sense of humor anyway and will probably involve how many people it takes to change a lightbulb.Clive James who knew he was dying of cancer let out his own ellipsis around the time of the end of season 2 of 'Game of Thrones'. His lament was that he would not live to see how it would all end on that TV series. He expressed some embarrassment that man of his age would be so caught up in the kind fiction that had dragons in it, but he needn't have worried - it's not as if his own poetry was terribly profound or deeply meaningful. Lucky for him, he outlasted the last season and saw it all end. I don't know what he thought of the end, whether he was with all the people that complained about it, to whether maybe he was exhausted by the narrative, he accepted for what it was.
When Francis Fukuyama wrote the book 'The End of History', it seemed eminently premature to declare not just because I was still young but because there were clearly lots of people still about from whence history would be made. The end of history necessarily comes when there is a last man standing, watching the devastated horror of the extinction of all living things, with nobody to read how it all happened.
Yet if the likes of Tacitus or Suetonius or Thucydides felt ellipsism it is not surprising nor is it something to be pitied. Have great empathy for their ellipsism. There is a desire to see out how things turn out. It is what keeps us tuned in and turned on to all the events that unfold around us. Perhaps it i the first human condition that takes place when one balances one's own mortality with the absolute of time.
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