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Alice, I think I’ve also experienced that sensation you had in the convenience shop. For me it feels like looking down and seeing for the first time that I’m standing on a minuscule ledge at a dizzying vertical height, and the only thing supporting my weight is the misery and degradation of almost everyone else on earth. And I always end up thinking: I don’t even want to be up here. I don’t need all these cheap clothes and imported foods and plastic containers, I don’t even think they improve my life. They just create waste and make me unhappy anyway. (Not that I’m comparing my dissatisfaction to the misery of actually oppressed peoples, I just mean that the lifestyle they sustain for us is not even satisfying, in my opinion.) People think that socialism is sustained by force – the forcible expropriation of property – but I wish they would just admit that capitalism is also sustained by exactly the same force in the opposite direction, the forcible protection of existing property arrangements. I know you know this. I hate having the same debates over and over again with the wrong first principles.
I’ve also been thinking lately about time and political conservatism, although in a different way. At the moment I think it’s fair to say we’re living in a period of historical crisis, and this idea seems to be generally accepted by most of the population. I mean the outward symptoms of the crisis, e.g. major unpredicted shifts in electoral politics, are widely recognisable as abnormal phenomena. To an extent, I think even some of the more ‘suppressed’ structural symptoms, like the mass drowning of refugees and the repeated weather disasters triggered by climate change, are beginning to be understood as manifestations of a political crisis. And I believe studies show that in the last couple of years, people have been spending a lot more time reading the news and learning about current affairs. It has become normal in my life, for example, to send text
messages like the following: tillerson out at state lmaoooo. It just strikes me that it really shouldn’t be normal to send texts like that. Anyway, as a consequence, each day has now become a new and unique informational unit, interrupting and replacing the informational world of the day before. And I wonder (you might say irrelevantly) what all this means for culture and the arts. I mean, we’re used to engaging with cultural works set ‘in the present’. But this sense of the continuous present is no longer a feature of our lives. The present has become discontinuous. Each day, even each hour of each day, replaces and makes irrelevant the time before, and the events of our lives make sense only in relation to a perpetually updating timeline of news content. So when we watch characters in films sit at dinner tables or drive around in cars, plotting to carry out murders or feeling sad about their love affairs, we naturally want to know at what exact point they are doing these things, relative to the cataclysmic historic events that structure our present sense of reality. There is no longer a neutral setting. There is only the timeline. I don’t know really whether this will give rise to new forms in the arts or just mean the end of the arts altogether, at least as we know them.
Your paragraph about time also reminded me of something I read online recently.
Apparently in the Late Bronze Age, starting about 1,500 years before the Christian era, the Eastern Mediterranean region was characterised by a system of centralised palace governments, which redistributed money and goods through complex and specialised city economies. I read about this on Wikipedia. Trade routes were highly developed at this time and written languages emerged. Expensive luxury goods were produced and traded over huge distances – in the 1980s a single wrecked ship from the period was discovered off the coast of Turkey, carrying Egyptian jewellery, Greek pottery, blackwood from Sudan, Irish copper, pomegranates, ivory. Then, during a seventy-five-
year period from about 1225 to 1150 BCE, civilisation collapsed. The great cities of the Eastern Mediterranean were destroyed or abandoned. Literacy all but died out, and entire writing systems were lost. No one is sure why any of this happened, by the way.
Wikipedia suggests a theory called ‘general systems collapse’, whereby ‘centralisation, specialisation, complexity, and top-heavy political structure’ made Late Bronze Age civilisation particularly vulnerable to breakdown. Another of the theories is headlined simply: ‘Climate change’. I think this puts our present civilisation in a kind of ominous light, don’t you? General systems collapse is not something I had ever really thought about as a possibility before. Of course I know in my brain that everything we tell ourselves about human civilisation is a lie. But imagine having to find out in real life.
Unrelatedly, and in fact so unrelatedly that it comes in at a sharp ninety-degree angle to my last paragraph, do you ever think about your biological clock? Not that I’m saying you should, I’m just wondering if you do. We are still pretty young, obviously. But the fact is that the vast majority of women throughout human history had already had several children by the time they reached our age. Right? I guess there’s no good way of checking that. I’m not even sure if you want to have children, now that I think of it. Do you? Or maybe you don’t know one way or another. As a teenager I thought I would rather die than have babies, and then in my twenties I vaguely assumed it was something that would just happen to me eventually, and now I’m about to turn thirty, I’m starting to think: well? There isn’t anyone queuing up to help me fulfil this biological function, needless to say. And I also have a weird and completely unexplained suspicion that I might not be fertile. There is no medical reason for me to think this. I mentioned it to Simon recently, in the course of complaining to him about my various other unsubstantiated medical anxieties, and he said he didn’t think I needed
to worry about that one, because in his opinion I have a ‘fertile look’. That made me laugh for like a day. I’m actually still laughing about it while I’m writing this email to you. Anyway, I’m just curious to know your thoughts. Considering the approaching civilisational collapse, maybe you think children are out of the question anyway.
I’m probably thinking about all this now because I saw Aidan randomly on the street the other day and immediately had a heart attack and died. Every subsequent hour since I saw him has been worse than the last. Or is it just that the pain I feel right now is so intense that it transcends my ability to reconstruct the pain I felt at the time?
Presumably, remembered suffering never feels as bad as present suffering, even if it was really a lot worse – we can’t remember how much worse it was, because remembering is weaker than experiencing. Maybe that’s why middle-aged people always think their thoughts and feelings are more important than those of young people, because they can only weakly remember the feelings of their youth while allowing their present experiences to dominate their life outlook. Still, my intuition is that I actually feel worse now, two days after seeing Aidan, than I felt in the moment of seeing him. I know that what happened between us was just an event and not a symbol – just something that happened, or something he did, and not an inevitable manifestation of my failure in life generally. But when I saw him, it was like going through it all over again. And Alice, I do feel like a failure, and in a way my life really is nothing, and very few people care what happens in it. It’s so hard to see the point sometimes, when the things in life I think are meaningful turn out to mean nothing, and the people who are supposed to love me don’t. I have tears in my eyes even typing this stupid email, and I’ve had nearly six months to get over it. I’m starting to wonder if I just never will. Maybe certain kinds of pain, at certain formative stages in life, just impress themselves into a person’s sense of