Time and Chance happen to all
One of my favorite quotations is Ecclesiastes 9:11 (New King James Version) 11 I returned and saw under the sun that-
The race is not to the swift,
Nor the battle to the strong,
Nor bread to the wise,
Nor riches to men of understanding,
Nor favor to men of skill;
But time and chance happen to them all.
George Orwell (”Politics and the English Language,” in Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays [New York, 1950,]p84 “translated” the verse into nominalized modern sociological jargon:
“Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits not tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must be invariably be taken into account.”
Jaan Puhvel, professor of classics and Indo-European Studies at the University of California notes that Orwell’s rendering amounts to parody (retaining content, but debasing form)
Or, as the popular idiom puts it, life is a crapshoot.
