Comment by wolverine876

2 years ago

> it took a 94 year-old intellectual to see the forest for the trees

As we massively devalue the humanities, many fewer people in later generations can muster this kind of analysis.

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wolverine876

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aidenn0  2 years ago

There was a short story (I think by Alfred Bester) with this premise. I can't find it at the moment though.

[edit]

I found it; it's called Disappearing Act[1]

In a future state of total war, patients at a facility for those with severe PTSD are going missing. They finally discover they are just disappearing while sleeping. Interviewing them, they find out they have been time-traveling to the past to escape the war. The general calls up a number of experts in various fields of sciences to try to understand it, until someone suggests calling in a historian. They find the one historian remaining in the country in a prison for refusing to fight. He observes that the stories reported by the soldiers are ahistorical and likely are fantasies created by the soldiers. He then states that a poet is the only one who could understand this. He then laughs as the general searches the country in vain for a poet.

1: https://thinkingoutsidethecoop.weebly.com/uploads/1/4/6/6/14...