Helprin again.

Did you ever say to yourself, "why can't I write like that?"

"The optimism and confidence of the fin de siècle — the one a hundred years ago — became the First World War; the Second World War; the Holocaust; the Cold War and its attendant, costly, proxy wars; and a century as much or more of alienation, misery, and death as of progress and the alleviation of suffering. Churchill was able to make an exception to the rule of blindness in the age of appeasement only because he had been an optimist prior to the Great War, and had bitterly learned the lesson he went on to teach — not that one policy or another is always right, but that throughout history grandiose expectations are almost always confounded and overturned in tragedy."