Travelogue 838 – January 7
Nice Continental Drift Divide

The effect of time on the human psyche is the feeling of never being incomplete. Identity is narrative. It’s stretched over the term of a life. It’s never gathered in one place. One only has access, at any given moment, to fragments of identity.

We write stories to explain this lack of wholeness. We’re damned by original sin. We lack enlightenment. We carry karmic debt. We’re ‘working shit out’.

Youth offers one kind of yearning, age another. I’ve seen both. Either you hunger for fulfilment of dreams and ambitions. Or one regrets the ambition of youth, so poorly used by life. Contentment is rare, but even contentment consists largely of resignation.

For the ageing, there comes a moment when he or she senses – often with a sinking feeling – that the world is no longer his or hers. It has changed. It already belongs to younger people.

I wonder what that might have felt like in the Middle Ages, when life expectancy was forty or less, and when there was no steady stream of technological developments to signal the march of time. Maybe change was signalled simply by weddings. Or the accession of new kings and lords. Maybe it was the year when one’s children took over the work of bringing in the harvest.

I’ve been reading a lot of magazines this year. (By year, I mean the academic year. I’ve virtually always been a student or a teacher.) I decided my time on the Metro could be more productive, so I started reading. It’s been enlightening.

I’ve discovered a few things. Journalism has surrendered to the suspense revolution. Readers must be enticed to continue with promise of revelation. Journalism has become a hybrid of narrative and analysis. Nothing happens without implications for the future; we know that much. But these days, no journalist trusts the reader with that future. An account of events is incomplete without prediction.

For another thing, magazine editors are in love with technology. I have a sense sometimes that scifi dystopia has become the lens of intellect. It’s as though ‘Blade Runner’ were voted our default destination. All is measured more or less by this Ridleyan yardstick. Within only the last six months, I’ve read about scary neurological research, the scary state of Silicon Valley, scary cryptocurrency, and scary social media trends.

The scary technology stuff strikes a nerve. I see it every day. I ride the Metro and watch the descent of all and sundry into their phones. When I walk the street, I dodge people on their phones. It’s as though I’m alone among robots. When people do happen to look up, they flinch. They turn away quickly, as though put off by what they’ve seen.

One recent article described sexual practices in the days of mobile phone hook-up and dating apps. The picture painted was rather grim, as though people were losing the knack of face-to-face conversation. I have no experience against which to gauge the report. It’s been a long time since I dated. I don’t accept the sensationalism at face value, but I do have to confess an eerie correspondence to my observations of urban Dutch youth. They’re nice enough, but all communication and relationship appear mediated in some way. Direct, spontaneous conversation feels like a social obligation to be dispatched with quickly, almost urgently. Meaningful communication is left to email or other indirect media.

I’m ageing. My friends are all younger. They might be beyond the age of social media hook-ups, but meetings with them have the disturbing feel of agenda items. Gone are the days of ‘hanging out’. One never glances at the clock in surprise. The clock is always present. The clock is the chair of the meeting.

My purpose in this blog entry is to nominate Candidate Number Four among reasons I had a New Year’s dream about the end of the world. Perhaps my moment has come, the moment when I realize that the custodianship of the world has been passed. I no longer recognize what I see as ‘mine’. I do recognize it as ‘theirs’, the world my students navigate quite comfortably.

Travelogue 837 – January 6
And I Feel Fine

We read to pass the time. Or is it more accurate to say that time passes us in high pursuit of the Word? St John claimed that before there was time there was Logos. And why should we question a seer from the time of Caesars?

I finished a book about Seneca the night before I had my dream about the end of the world. It was a biography written by someone who seems to be a young (for a respected classicist) star in the field. She made some fame for herself being the first woman to translate the Odysseus into English … ever.

I had a hard time separating the author form her subject, and I don’t think that’s generally a credit to the biographer. Granted, we know that times past are chattel to the ones present, that there is no such thing as an objective picture of the past, and that subjects are at the mercy of their artists, etc. But, on the whole, I still favour a biographer who endeavours to lurk far in the background.

I don’t believe this author was trying to push herself to the fore. But I had the distinct impression that she found poor Seneca contemptible. No doubt he deserved it. And I must say, in the author’s defence, that it seems to be the fashion of our times. Neutrality is frowned upon as insincerity. So readers of the biography are repeatedly, and without much art, led back to the question of Seneca’s hypocrisy.

The core of this hypocrisy lies in the conflict between his philosophy and his politics. Truthfully, it is hard to imagine a stronger contrast. The same man known through the ages as a Stoic philosopher, writing about the meaninglessness of earthly riches and achievement, accrued staggering power and wealth as advisor to the crazy czar Nero.

If the point of the book had been judgement, I would have preferred a form other than biography. Write an extended essay, with claim and evidence. We would have learned as much about his life in this way and felt included in the program.

Oddly, though, moral positioning in the case of Seneca’s hypocrisy seemed to occupy a weak second among the author’s thoughts. A hint about her first love might lie in titles of other works of hers: “Mocked with Death” and “The Death of Socrates”.

Yes, here we address the theme dovetailing so neatly and terribly with the subject of my apocalyptic dream: death. Seneca was man obsessed with death. This isn’t a shocking preoccupation for a Stoic philosopher, who promotes good living informed by reflection about death, a foreshadowing of the wonderfully dark meditations of medieval moralists. In fact, Seneca, was accepted by many Christian writers as one of their own. Dante made sure he was safe in Limbo. Nor is it shocking that a man who led a very public life in Rome during the time of the maddest Caesars would be preoccupied with death. He advised young Nero, something like befriending hyenas in the wild.

Again, I might have felt more involved in the author’s argument if the argument had been more explicit. Thesis: what can we learn from this early and unique discussion of the value and possibility of pursuing a good life and a peaceful life among the dangers of a public service in corrupt times, written by someone who tried it and who fundamentally tried to publicly chronicle his attempt. Under Caligula and Nero. Now that’s interesting!

Practice death in your daily life, Seneca advised. It’s not at all a unique dictum. Be ready to let go. Be content with your life, as a story rounded and complete already. Meaning, ensuring that moral accounts are clean and audited. He argued often and passionately that people must be happy in the most extreme conditions. In grief, in danger, and in poverty.

I think again of the people wandering in my dream. They had realized the world was ending. Slowly and sleepily, they let go the routines of the day. And they turned inward, trying to make some sense of it all. That’s the pre-eminent human activity, crunching the data of world observed and world experienced to find or manufacture sense.

Time starts again. Humans are born. They start their lives hungrily, and they start with luminous human innocence. A universe dedicated to the most efficient lines of progress would not be organized this way, with legions of young creatures fanning out to occupy positions held by older ones who are in a state of quick decline. The young rarely listen. They have developed pride before sense. The old are enervated and mesmerized by their deterioration.

But I digress, and I foreshadow, at one and the same moment. The haunting of Seneca was Reason Three for why I might have dreamt about the end of the world when I did. Reason Four comes next time. I have to confess to ageing myself, to a certain deterioration of my capabilities. I hope to be able to deliver. I wonder sometimes whether I will make it to the next blog.

Seneca would advise to find happiness in even this circumstance: quiet decay amidst the plain and the mundane. I have no Nero to threaten me with violence. I have no society expecting ritual suicide. I have no absurd fortune, no palaces furnished in cypress and citrus wood. I have no insane intellect or talent that promises to make my memory cherished among monks who read my words to candlelight. They won’t practice my phrases over and over, hoping to imitate my style in English class.

Even so, is life rounded and complete? Was it rounded and complete when I was born? That might be the truest question. It tortured those monks, defrocked in the Reformation, who wondered about baptism and the fate of the soul. But I digress…

Travelogue 836 – January 5
Of the World As

I’ve had occasion to comment already on my confused sense of time. In the passage of passing, I find time mad with the sacking and the purging of its own citadels. It circles round itself like a dervish, and among the debris of the turning cyclone, it’s quite possible I found the source of my dream after waking.

Prominent in the news on the morning after my dream were more stories about the inauguration of Brasil’s new president, a rogue named Bolsonaro, hysterical with machismo, who swept in from the fringes right of the right to capture the presidency. His emotional populism struck all the right notes. He made no secret of his admiration for the current U.S. President. Of course, it didn’t hurt his chances that his biggest opponent ran his campaign from a prison cell. Add in an aura of martyrdom, after he was knifed at a campaign rally, and he had a charmed campaign.

Bolsonaro’s inauguration was an appropriate show of muscle. He commandeered three thousand troops, guards on horses, tanks, fighter jets, and even missiles for his grand entrance. We know how fond boys can be of military parades. (Macron showed real cunning in arranging for Trump street-side seats for a parade in Paris. It almost salvaged the Europe alliance. Effete, socialist France could still put on a show!)

Within hours of gaining power, Bolsonaro demonstrated what power means to weak minds. It means striking at defenceless people. Trump took aim at immigrants, flexing his might by going after the children of desperately poor people. For Bolsonaro, the weak are the indigenous peoples of Brasil, whom he has compared to animals in a zoo. Post haste, he transferred leadership of the agency recognizing protected lands for indigenous peoples to the ministry of agriculture. This is also a favourite ploy of Trump’s, handing agencies over to the enemies of the agency’s mission. It’s wonderfully effective.

And environmental policy? The autumn of 2018 saw the publication of several high-impact studies about climate change. One study found that 70% of the planet’s surviving wilderness falls in five countries. One of those is Brasil. Senhor Bolsonaro joins Trump and Putin in an elite club of power-mad narcissists who have the power to condemn future generations to extreme privation.

The new president is committed to opening up land and rivers to mining and dams, logging and agriculture: a direct assault on humanity’s last, long-shot hopes of containing the climate crisis. Lesser men might succumb to moments of reflection or self-doubt, allowing that, even though they may have personal reservations about the science of climate change – despite the well-documented opinion of 90+% of the world’s scientists, – the stakes are too high. We don’t elect people with healthy self-doubt. We elect one-dimensional caricatures of men because we nurture a persistent faith in the smug. A man smug must be a man accomplished.

It’s become fashionable to cast doubt on the efficacy and morality of democracy. While I would like to join in the defence of an institution that is clearly one of the best of human achievements, I do have one nagging question: how do we justify – in the name of any ideal – making vulnerable the world’s environment to the caprice of damaged boys like Trump and Bolsonaro? While we, the loyal opposition, feel good about ourselves, showcasing our tolerance and well-bred political literacy, permanent damage is being done daily to the planet. The effects aren’t abstract. They aren’t far away. They will affect our children.

Simply put, are there areas of policy that should be taken out of the realm of local politics, whatever the philosophical construction? Aren’t there things too important for these games? Or shall we go down with the ship, linking arms and singing sentimental songs about poor, dumb homo sapiens?

In context, dreaming about the end of the world seems entirely appropriate. It’s an age in which people are prescribed medication instead of umbrellas when they look out their windows and see clouds. In Dorothy’s time, we might, in extremis, have secured ourselves in the cellar. But cause and effect have become tricks of the mind: if we had had a better attitude, the clouds might have turned out to be rubies from heaven, more than we could sew into all the slippers in the world.

I endeavour to be clear: I had a dream that the world was coming to an end. In this series of blogs, I am trying to identify possible sources for this pessimistic production of the mind. I have discussed two of four now. In my next essay, I will explore another obvious source of sad meditations, Roman philosophy. It’s something that haunts us all.

Travelogue 835 – January 4
It’s the End

I’m examining possible sources for the gloom in my dream, occurring on (only) the second of the year. The first source should be the obvious one. I’ll dispatch with it forthwith.

It’s no secret that I’m getting older. I’ve complained about it often enough in this blog. I may be alone in this experience. I have evidence that it has happened before – that people have aged – and that people have found it an ordeal. But I don’t have definitive evidence that everyone has the same experience. Most people I see, I see every day. If they age, it’s at a rate that I can’t visually track. The exceptions to that rule are my children, whose growth is quite readily apparent. Their ageing we parents see, and they see, as something wonderful. The family celebrates it. “I’m a big girl now!” (Even as, inside, I mourn the passing stage. But I must make sacrifices in the name of consistency.) When I was little, I said, “I’m a big boy now!” How quickly things change! Nowadays, ageing is an embarrassment and an affliction. I regret it. I must regret everything. I’m dreaming about the world coming to an end.

I visited the dentist on the day before my dream, to finish up one root canal. How many I have in progress now escapes me (note of despair). But the dental chair is well-suited to meditations of mortality. You have little opportunity to multi-task while someone operates in your mouth. Maybe that’s the last frontier for developers of smart technology. No moment must be wasted that could be invested in porn or in swiping right on enticements.

For the moment, all one can do in the dental chair is stare at the ceiling or the lamp aimed down your throat. You might also wonder at the hirsute nature of your kindly dentist. How hairy his one arm is! His assistant’s arm is smooth and white, by contrast. She provides the delicacy. When you jump at the shot of pain administered when the dentist drills as far as your upper jaw, she’s the one who wrinkles her brow above the mask and asks if you are all right. The dentist manifests his irritation that she would ask, that you would answer, by pulling his fingers and the attenuated metal of his instruments from your mouth abruptly. I want to apologize, but I realize it would only contribute to his annoyance. Even shrugging would tilt his workspace violently. Best to allow graciousness a bye this time.

Your teeth are one of those gauges of progress along the arc of vigour and physical integrity. They aren’t constituted to recover as readily – at all – from your excesses as other organs of the body. There comes a point of no return when it sinks in. “Oh dear, those molars are not coming back.” The teeth you have left are delicate. There are things you can’t comfortably chew anymore. You monitor what goes in your mouth – a new perspective!

The case of my mother should have provided me the requisite cautionary tale. Only a year or two before she passed away, she spent who-can-tell-how-many thousands on a bridge. The impact of the dental surgery threw me off the scent of the more substantial emaciation she had suffered at the hand of her cancer. Did she regret the dollars she spent on her teeth when she discovered the cancer? I dare ask because I have had my own doubts when I’ve been presented with the dentist’s bills, when I have been presented with dreams about the end of the world. All sorts of blasphemy occur to you when your fragile teeth start talking to you in the middle of the night.

I do become confused about time in the passage of time. Or I might say, time renders me passing helpless in the stream of passage. After so many wakings, one wakes to wonderment. Where have I left things? Where was my phone? Where my wisdom teeth, and where my fabled innocence?

Wouldn’t it be better to face the world-engulfing wave of destruction with one’s innocence intact? We suffer for the innocent, and we fight to survive. We never quite make the connection between those two instincts. We realize when it’s too late, once the reflex to fight has become involuntary, that our teeth speak a language of truth that pity does not. What Kierkegaard wanted to ask, but for his northern courtesy, was whether Abraham’s suffering wasn’t always more important, given all the years granted him, than that of his green and bland son, and, further, that the outcome on the mountaintop was of no real consequence either way.

So I submit Item Number One in my deliberation about what informed my dream about the end of the world. That item is ageing, and more, the sensory and inescapable evidence of ageing. To which, you ask, of the many types of ageing referred to in the literature do I refer? That would be: Type Inexorable.

Then just to tie the big spotted bow on the package of logic that I’m delivering late for Christmas, I will draw the line between source and dream. In the language of the unconscious, (or the language of metaphor, for those of who don’t feel the need for a devilish internal daemon), personal death is the equivalent of the end of the world. And for those of us fated for ageing (Type Inexorable), ageing is often linked to personal death.

I yearn to be clear, and so I disclose there are four sources for the dream I have identified. By the end of this close examination, I will have achieved little. A dream is a dream, after all. But writing strives for illumination, in the way a cat rolls on its back to activate a motion-sensitive lamp.

Travelogue 834 – January 3
As We Know It

I dreamt last night that the end of the world was coming. Somewhat at variance with short timelines implied, the dream was a long one. It stretched on and on, and seemed to account for every hour left to us. But it wasn’t going to be a sudden solar flare or chain of earthquakes. We knew it was coming.

The world was coming to an end in a matter of days -- collision with a meteor or something – and people everywhere were coming to grips with it at their own pace. I was among the first wave to give up work and daily routines. That fits: happy for any excuse to set work aside. By the end of the dream, everyone had given up. They were wandering aimlessly and grappling with the meaning of it all.

It’s a scale we deal with so glibly in movies. If you like superhero movies, as I do, you’ve been brought to the precipice many times over and have lost no sleep over it. But when you’ve been given even the quasi-real space of a dream in which to meditate it, you have an opportunity to experience the dead silence of it. People confronted suddenly with the destruction of everything don’t run to the nearest orgy, as we’re trained to think. They go into shock. They stare out windows. They pace. They become lost.

It was one of those dreams in which the tone didn’t match the content. I was not thunderstruck. I was not even sad. For some reason, I started thinking about libraries. Had we done everything to preserve our genius? It made no sense, of course, if the planet itself was going to be blown up. But the mood of the dream was my point. I had no heavy feeling of doom or horror – while I was asleep. Awake, I was more affected. I was spooked, and I had some trouble getting back to sleep. I replayed the dream over and over in my thoughts.

Two elements stood out. First, by the end of the dream, I was singing REM’s “It's the end of the world as we know it”. I thought that was funny. I also thought it was funny in the dream. Secondly, I only remembered one familiar face from the dream, one close friend. She was sad. When I mentioned the library mission, she mumbled something about finding her own books and retreated into her own melancholy resignation.

If one assumes such dreams don’t represent prophecy - and I’m not ready to don the sandwich boards yet, – then they beg interpretation. Lacking any insights there, one looks for sources. Among the latter, I had some notions. They are absurd. All ideas hatched under this kind of pressure must be absurd. So I share them in a spirit of good humour.

We have just celebrated the new year. Why would I indulge in such horrific pessimism? I defer to the unconscious on that point. If dreams are the product of the unconscious, and if the unconscious is the faithful ledger that it’s often represented to be, – though I must disclose that I do have my doubts about the infallibility of the unconscious (gasp!) – then even this holiday season, habitually treated with such force(d)ful optimism, must play its part in the genesis of my apocalyptic vision. I have no choice but to indict even the infant year 2019.

What follows is a discussion of the sources of my dream. I have arbitrarily identified four of them.