As a post-industrial American, I thought of history as increasing linearly, until the exponential bend in the graph at 1750. Wealth, technology, investment, consumption—marketable values were the only y-value my bourgeois working mind perceived. I realized history was cyclical when I realized the y-axis is not static. I read Socrates and listened to classical Waltz and asked myself: have we progressed? Or just pursued contemporary brilliance? Expanding contemporary brilliance of the time. Though any one modern man struggles to remember to reach the heights of a Renaissance man. He is enamored with what modern fashions applaud.