Lyme Hall from the South-West, Country Life, Dec. 17th 1904

A bracing article in Slate on the subject of 2012 appeared recently and I will not even trouble you with a link to it for I should be very surprised indeed if you were not as impressed as I was by the author's persuasive views and his enviable confidence, especially as regards the future.  You or I may live in fear and trembling of what perils the afternoon may bring, let alone what may transpire in a few years time, but the author of the Slate piece is one of those brave young men who is not only able to look unflinchingly at the road ahead but blessed with the ability to tell the rest of us cowering souls what's coming.  And the news is good: all this talk about the Mayan calendar and monumental earth-shattering shifts of consciousness in the year 2012 is, he assures us, just nonsense and hokum, silliness and stupidity, and worse than superstition, the dubious product of swindlers and con-men out to separate you from your hard-earned dollar. 

What a relief, I hear you saying.  I could not agree more.  As in the case of Y2K or the Apocalypse or the catastrophic destruction heralded by the appearance of the Hale-Bopp Comet, I know like me you find a comfort in having someone around who is able to see through the hype.  I only wish a fellow with his foresight and wisdom had been available in the run-up to the millenium before this last one, for it certainly would have saved untold hours of labor and expense in building all those cathedrals if we'd only known the deadline for Judgment Day had been postponed, apparently indefnitely.  At any rate, the much touted Final Reckoning failed to take place in the year 1000.  Ooops.  Talk about embarrassing, having to explain to the faithful that while, yes, they'd put their blood and sweat and tears into these monuments to the Lord, the End was not yet quite nigh.  But soon!

Understandably, therefore, I work in reverse.  I have spent the last two years in hindsight, as it were, in 1904, and I must tell you, I find this approach infinitely more rewarding.  Yes, I admit I may have made a passing reference [Here for instance] to predictions regarding the future and 2012, but by and large I have stayed on the familiar terra firma of the past.  Thinking is contagious, after all.  You have one person focused on doom and gloom and the next thing you know you've got a whole class thinking they're done for.  I was reminded of this just the other day during our little chat about Lyme Hall and the Legh family who'd lived in the same stately home for six hundred years.  Just look at it!  Now try and imagine how Lord and Lady Newton could have convinced themselves that by the end of the hostilities, there'd be nothing left of the world in which they'd grown up and grown old, and there would be no place for them in the post-war prosperity.  Unfortunately, like any self-fulfilling prophesy, they ended up being right.  I think you see my point. 

I don't fault them, mind you.  I admit there was a dark time in my own life when I could not shake an almost overwhelming sense of impending disaster.  I see now in retrospect, of course, that habitually consuming much more than the recommended dose of drugs and alcohol and then operating heavy machinery was in no one's best interest, and was doubtless a major contributing factor to my negative state of mind; one could even argue that the catastrophic end I so greatly feared had been induced, as it were.  The truth is, however, that the doom I felt only ceased to be impending when I changed my ways.  A bullet, as they say, was dodged; a crisis averted.

The beauty of looking backward --  to 1904 or to any turning point in time I suppose -- is that one can so easily demonstrate in retrospect how nicely everything falls into place.  They say the facts will speak for themselves, but I say you frame those facts and the frame will do most of the talking for them.  It's the focus that provides the meaning.  It's a matter of perspective.

What happens with the future is a little less obvious, I'm afraid.  A future point only helps to focus a possible convergence, or reveal a potential significance. The future isn't just about what people think will happen; it is also about what people think will happen and whose fault it is. Or what should happen and whose fault that is if it doesn't.  Unfortunately, as we know from the past, it is often a particular religious group who are at fault for having insinuated themselves into the intimate circle of the Prince of Wales, or for having taken over the banking industry.  Or both.  In like fashion is a certain group accused these days of destroying the American Family, with the resulting side effects of earthquakes, hurricanes, unfavorable election results and, rather curiously, a spike in unwed teen pregancies.  

But the point is it isn't what's going to happen as much as it is how you feel about it.  In this respect the Mitford sisters are probably the best full-gamut range I can think of for reactions to the decline and fall of the British aristocracy.  Nancy wrote amusing novels about it; her sister Debo married the Duke of Devonshire and sidestepped the issue, her sister Unity fell in love with Hitler, her sister Diana married Oswald Mosley, the English fascist.  Yes, we can dismiss Unity for having been unhinged, but Diana's embrace of fascism is more distressing.  And yet, what if, looking at Lyme Hall again, you were convinced that the noble order of society represented by that stately pile, that noble order to which you belonged, were all to be turned out of their homes and sent packing if they hadn't been already and forced like you and your sisters to make some kind of living and that, in a sense, they -- this noble patrician breed of men and women -- were being killed off by universal suffrage and "unfettered democracy"  (as David Cannadine puts it in his discussion of the subject).  And what if you were persuaded further that all of this was happening as a result of flagrantly inept government and the evil influence of Bolsheviks and Jews?  Okay, yes, I grant you it's still hard to conceive, even after the fact.

As I've said before, however, I used to feel like something awful was about to happen and I desperately wanted to blame somebody.  That I ended up in many respects with nobody to blame but myself doesn't make me wrong, exactly.  Nor do I think it is all that great an exaggeration to say that the way I was living then needed to change.  The wonder is I lived to tell the tale.  That any of us lived, in fact, is not unremarkable, for the world changed as it inevitably does and plenty of people I know didn't make it.  Now, looking back, I can tell you how and when and why it all happened.  But if you had told me back then, I wouldn't have believed you.  And some people never change their minds, you know.  They're committed to a particular view of the past and a particular view of the future and that's all there is to it. 

Still, I imagine lots of things will change when we get to the other side of 2012.  I suspect we will look back and be able to see what was going on, and even perhaps why it felt the way it did, and possibly even exactly when everything shifted and began to seem different; we will then see with startling clarity where we were right and wrong, what we really should have been worried about, what we could have done, might have done, should have done if we'd only tried to understand or had paid more attention.  And in another way, from a different vantage point, we will see that everything back then (meaning now) was just the way it always had been and always is, that everything was in a state of changing, everything was ending and constantly dying and being reborn.