History Rhymes, and Sometimes It Bites

By Professor Matt W.

“History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

The line is usually handed to Mark Twain, as so many good lines are. Twain has become the patron saint of things we wish someone clever had said. But whether Twain said it or not matters less than the truth hiding inside it: the past rarely returns wearing the same coat, but it does come back humming the same tune.

I have been thinking about this lately, not in the grand way historians do, with maps and kings and wars and dates marching neatly across a textbook page, but in the strange, sideways way memory works. Memory does not arrive chronologically. It arrives like an old dog scratching at the door.

I remember hating school.

Not disliking it. Not being “unmotivated,” as some well-meaning adult might have written in a file. Hating it. School, for me, was not a sanctuary of learning but a machine of humiliation, boredom, pressure, and confusion. There were bells and rules and desks and the peculiar smell of old paper and floor wax. There were teachers who could see numbers on a page but not the child sitting behind them.

And then, because memory has no manners, I remember my dog.

His name was Puppy.

Yes, Puppy. Not Apollo, not Winston, not some regal name carved for a purebred animal with a ribbon around its neck and a family tree longer than most European monarchies. Just Puppy. He was a mutt, though technically he was a Peekapoo, part Pekingese, part poodle, back before people said “designer breed” with a straight face and charged more for it than a used Honda.

Back then, he was not a designer anything. He was a funny little creature with a face like a question mark and the dignity of a mop that had seen combat.

Maybe that is why I loved him. He felt familiar. I did not come from polish or pedigree either. I was not raised among people who knew which fork to use, which door to enter, or which quiet codes unlocked the world. Like Puppy, I felt improvised—patched together out of ambition, embarrassment, instinct, pain, humor, and hunger.

There are children who seem to inherit belonging as naturally as eye color. I was not one of them. Somewhere deep inside, long before I could have articulated it, I made a promise: my children would not feel like outsiders wandering the perimeter. They would grow up surrounded by books, music, language, beauty, and ideas. They would not have to ask permission to be interesting.

A dangerous promise, maybe. A noble one, too. Most parental ambition is just childhood pain dressed in a blazer.

Puppy grew old, as dogs rudely insist on doing. Age came first in small betrayals—slower steps, cloudy eyes, the disappearance of that puppyish bounce that had once seemed immortal. Then came tumors and wounds, visible reminders that flesh has its limits. There are sights childhood does not know how to file away.

So it stores them.

Years later, the image returns—not as a memory exactly, but as a prophecy I did not know I had been given.

I never imagined that some version of that affliction would find me too. Not literally the same, perhaps, but close enough for the rhyme to be unmistakable. The body keeps its own archive. It remembers what the mind has edited. It repeats themes in new instruments: the wound, the shame, the exposure, the old fear of being seen where one is most vulnerable.

History does not repeat. It rhymes.

The child sees the dog suffering and thinks, That is something that happens to animals.

The adult suffers and realizes, No, that is something that happens to bodies.

Then, if he is lucky—or unlucky enough to become philosophical—he sees more deeply still: That is something that happens to all living things.

We are all, every one of us, trying to carry dignity in a body that will eventually betray us.

That is the scandal of being alive. We build schools, write books, raise children, argue about politics, polish our shoes, frame our degrees, and pretend we are marble statues with calendars. But underneath the costume, we are flesh. Glorious, ridiculous, temporary flesh.

And yet this is not a sad thought to me. Not entirely.

There is something almost comic about the whole arrangement. The Greeks understood this better than we do. Their heroes were magnificent, but they were always limping somewhere. Achilles had his heel. Odysseus had his wandering. Oedipus had his sight, which was useless until he lost it. The gods gave men glory, but never without a punchline hidden in the hem.

Maybe Puppy, in his strange little way, was one of my first philosophers.

He taught me that love is not reserved for the purebred. He taught me that nobility does not require papers. He taught me that a creature can be ridiculous and sacred at the same time. He taught me that suffering is not always grand. Sometimes it is small, smelly, undignified, and heartbreaking. Sometimes it sits beside you on the couch and asks for scraps.

And perhaps he taught me something else: that the things we pity from a distance may one day become the things we understand from the inside.

That is the rhyme.

The boy who hated school becomes the man who builds one.

The child who felt like a mutt tries to give his children a lineage—not of blood, not of snobbery, but of thought, courage, language, and beauty.

The dog who suffered in ways too ugly to describe becomes, years later, a mirror.

And the past, that old trickster, does not repeat itself. It does something more unsettling. It changes the words just enough that we almost miss the tune.

Almost.

But not quite.

Because eventually, if we live long enough, we begin to hear it.

The rhyme is there in our bodies.

It is there in our children.

It is there in the schools we hated and the schools we build.

It is there in every wound that becomes wisdom, every shame that becomes mercy, every mutt that teaches a man what nobility really means.

History rhymes because we do.

We are made of echoes.::: הכנתי לך את זה כטיוטה חזקה, אבל הייתי משנה בעדינות את הביטוי “purebred children” בפרסום סופי כדי שלא ייקרא ביולוגית או מעמדית מדי. כאן פירשתי אותו כירושה של תרבות, ביטחון, יופי, שפה, וחינוך—not bloodline.