“Oh you know, nothing new under the sun”
, you reply with a slightly disillusioned pout to the obliging people who check in on you.
The days follow one another and are similar, and nothing seems to break through the monotony of everyday life.
The expression itself is not new, you lament.
On everyone's lips, repeated in the media, it is not by using it that you will change the course of things.
And yet!
If it is so popular, it is because its history is fascinating.
King Solomon, Nietzsche, Marcus Aurelius, Ionesco have this in common: they embraced this profound apophthegm, which has the value of a maxim.
What does it mean?
To discover
Crosswords, Sudoku, 7 Letters... Keep your mind alert with Le Figaro Games
Toussaint: “The French language and its grammar have allowed us to think like Christians for centuries”
“Vanity of vanities (…) Everything is vanity! What profit does man derive from the trouble he puts in under the sun? »
Thus begins the book of Ecclesiastes, which gives voice in the Old Testament to a certain Qohelet.
It is from this widely copied, quoted, commented on, diverted text that our mysterious sentence comes from.
Many of the aphorisms and sentences it contains have, with it, passed into everyday language, such as
“there is a time for everything”.
The verse comes at the conclusion of the prologue.
In the midst of the incessant surge of new inventions and pseudo-revolutionary ideas, the author wants to show their conformism and their absurdity.
For the heart of man is immutable.
Each generation seeks to remake the world, but only one key matters, the one found in detachment from things that end at death.
Death is the most shared condition, as this book from the Old Testament, written hundreds of years before our era, reminds us.
No project, no science even survives there.
“
Vanitas vanitatum”
The enigmatic Qohelet claims to be
"son of David"
, and to have reigned over Israel in Jerusalem.
It is in fact probably King Solomon, celebrated for his great wisdom.
Having spent a long time researching and carefully examining "everything that happens under the sun", the author declares that he found only
"vanity and fodder for the wind"
.
In the evening of his life, he invites us to take a new and radical look.
“What has been is what will be;
what happened will happen again.
»
The sentence continues to ring true in its bitter irony, and its denunciation of absurd quests.
“When someone tells you about something: Come and see, it’s new, don’t believe it; the thing in question has already existed in the centuries that preceded us. »
, it is written later in the book.
“The men of the past no longer have any memory among us;
the men of the future will not leave more for those who come after them.
»
Thus, men constantly repeat the same mistakes, and hardly learn from the errors of the past.
The text has continued to fascinate philosophers, poets and painters.
Let us think, for example, of the famous
“vanitas”,
these paintings allegorically painting the fragility of human life, with skulls, tulips and candlesticks.
This harsh observation of the transience of things finds its most striking parallel in Greek philosophy.
“Everything flows”
is Heraclitus’ most famous phrase.
“You never bathe twice in the same river
,” he said.
The Latin poet Ovid preferred to write that
“moments flee in the same way, and moments follow in the same way”.
Same assessment with Marcus Aurelius.
Thought of the eternal return
In Nietzsche, the thought of eternal return is directly inspired by it.
Let's imagine a life that would have to be lived again, again and again.
A good criterion by which to measure the value of one's existence.
If everyone has to relive the moments they go through, it is in their best interest that they be dense and dignified.
“How naive is our spirit / Who strives to create but only to give birth / Only a second time to the child of other eras!”
chanted Shakespeare in one of his
Sonnets
.
These pieces of wisdom continue to influence many writings.
Eugène Ionesco, this poet of the ridicule of the human condition and of tragic irony, was thus able to write: “Nothing new under the sun when there is no sun.”
Recently, Hervé le Tellier explained in the columns of Le Figaro that he regularly cited fragments of Ecclesiastes:
“For the first time, human destiny is taken in its entirety, as if generations succeeded one another and nothing changed.”