Waiting for what is to come

Snow this morning: granular snow tucked around the daffodils and hyacinths, the new hard green of the grass pastel, snow grains thrown hard by the north wind against the magnolia buds and my face.

Just finished Charles Emmerson's 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War. It's a visit to the most 23 significant cities around the globe, giving us a sense of what it felt like to be there in 1913: what had just been happening, what people were talking about, arguing about, worrying about, looking forward to.

Starting with Europe, where the tinder would soon burst into raging fire, to the Americas, and Asia, this world tour reminded me that the world always has the same kind of feel to it: much to hope for, much to dread, much to shake our heads at, occasions of pride, poignancy and deplorability in each place. Every age of mankind's existence is somebody's golden age or ghastly omen.

1913 doesn't come across as a specially dysfunctional year; indeed many of the unresolved issues of that year are with us today. The brutalist misogyny of today may find its paternity in the Edwardian resistance to women's suffrage. The perplexing issue of Japan's place in the world, for instance, was felt acutely in 1913, but not resolved until the mid-century. Certain pressing issues survive even catastrophic war, will not let go of us short of resolution or extinction.

The Minkowski interpretation makes the past, the present, and the future a single block of space-time, where the limits of what can happen in any subsequent second must fall within the cone representing how far light can travel in that second. The future is already there,  just unpredictable.  The God-in-love framework is based on the conviction that the future is radically open: what will emerge might have not. In each second kindling is laid up and seeds planted from which whatever does burst into flame or bloom will come.

The Other of the year 1913 looms over the book, what happened next, the awful spawn of world war. In fact, each subsequent year is the offspring of the one before, delightful and devastating, the great themes running through the generations, but the futures unfurled or foreclosed in times each unique in profile and particulars.

Tomorrow as Other. It may pick up tiny mistakes, say, and amplify them into huge blunders, or not. It may make achievements potent or sterile. It will fulfill our wishes and defy them. What tomorrow will do to what we are expecting today is also a kind of encounter. Hospitality, friendship and exploration can be practiced, forward and backward.

Yesterday as Other. Thinking about 1913, I want to say to that year a century past: "I can understand what it was like for you. It's not too much different today. We'll do our best to carry on so that, perhaps, 2113 will look mercifully on us."