Chapter 1: Every thing is hebel, a Hebrew word which means vapor or mist- all are unsubstantial, do not really satisfy the human soul. We think again of Augustine's well-known words: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and restless are our hearts until they rest in you."

Generations come and go but the earth stays the same. There is nothing new under the sun-- of course Q did not dream of the fabulous technological advances made in our day, But yet the substantial picture remains: nothing really satisfies us. Suicide rates are up today. It is still true that all streams run to the sea, but the sea does not overflow.

He is not thinking of the common Greek cyclical thought that all goes in circles: Plato, in Timaeus 22; Statesman 269 and Laws 677. Plato even taught a cycle of rebirths for the individual though the philosopher might eventually escape rebirth: Phaedrus 247-48, Phaedo 70 ff and 114. There was also a cyclic aspect in the Platonic Great World Year: cf. Timaeus 38-39.

Other philosophers taught an unending cycle of destructions and restorations of the whole world. Prob. earliest is Anaximander ( cf. 610-545 BC); Aristotle On the Heavens 21. 10, in 279B says that the cycle was also held by Empedocles and Heraclitus. It is found in the Stoics: cf. Diogenes Laertius, Zeno 8. 137. It is even in the Christian writer Origen, Peri archon 3. 5. 3. St. Augustine in City of God 12. 12-15 thinks such theories are an attempt to explain how God who is unchangeable, made the world in time - he gets this from a very fanciful exegesis of Psalm 11 (12) esp. the last two verses: "The wicked walk in a circle". Cf. also Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return.

He says he also applied his mind to know wisdom and madness and folly - that attempt too is chasing the wind. He is not of course denigrating true wisdom, but false wisdom.