What will history look like when it arrives?

#43—On Death, train rides, George Saunders, and making history.

Welcome to Mind Flexing, your fortnightly thought expedition to everywhere and anywhere. Strap on your boots (or put your feet up), take a deep breath, and let’s get flexing.  

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“I just want to say that history, when it arrives, may not look as you expect, based on the reading of history books. Things in there are always so clear. One knows exactly what one would have done.”

—George Saunders, Love Letter

It was the time of year in Toronto when people are forgiven for going mad—the mouldy-end of winter with its Seasonal Affective Disorder and pent-up desire for the sun on your skin. The morning subway ride to Bloor-Yonge started like any other, head down, each to their own in books and Kindles and magazines and maybe the odd phone, although not as many as you would see today as this was the era of the Blackberry and phones were less distracting then as they are now.

I was possibly reading A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah and engrossed in a world of human savagery and hope when the train doors parted and he walked in, tall with dark hair slicked down the back of his neck, wearing tatters of black and an unbuttoned Matrix-like coat that hovered a foot above the gritty train floor. In his left hand was a sharp-toothed metal rake, a rake too shiny to have ever touched the earth, its brand stickers unweathered. It reached down toward the floor like an extension of his arm, which rotated outward so his palm faced forward. In fact, he held both arms this way. And although I knew what he held to be a rake, my mind’s eye formed it into a scythe because he looked like Death; definitely not the gardening type. I observed all this while maintaining the standard commuter pose of looking down, a guise of staring at words on a page while my periphery vision scanned the carriage for signs of life.

In hindsight, being seated closest to a door that Death had walked through was not the best seat to have chosen, but how is one to know where to sit when the day arrives? This seat had been vacant, which is a welcome sight in the soap-scented crush of commuters on their way to work. Legs dangled over all the seats, with a few lonesome soles, or should I say souls, standing in the corners. Death took three steps toward me and paused, and I, noting it to be a concerted move, looked up into his dark eyes, around which the skin draped with the weight of something indiscernible. And I scanned those eyes in search of his intention but found them to be vacant, locked onto my pupils while focused on something a million miles beyond. What did he see with those holes on his long dour face that those of us in that cell of a carriage couldn’t?

It's always unnerving to become the focus of someone in the grip of psychosis. Anything is possible, and not knowing the person—their fears, their anxieties, their triggers—makes it terribly hard to know what to do and how to behave. It can be, especially with a weapon involved, a dangerous situation, and yet I have a great deal of sympathy for those who have been hijacked by their minds.  

Finding nothing in his eyes, I looked back to my book, not wanting to draw any more attention to my presence than had already been noted, and I stared at its arrangement of letters as he stepped closer, his shins now pressing into each of my knees, his coat brushing against my leg, and his scythed arm, palm forward, ready and tense. Again, I looked to the legs around me and raised my gaze to their faces and found each to be dutifully turned away, and seeing now the scythe rise up until it was a quarter off the ground, and feeling the icicle of a Canadian winter scrape down my spine, my eyes darted again at the faces of the legs in the hope of catching the slightest glimpse from someone, anyone—a look that without words would say, ‘we’re here’. But there were no glimpses. No one was there. The carriage of commuters kept to their poses.

On the TTC, chalk sketch by Alia Parker.

It's dispiriting to feel so vulnerable and alone, abandoned in a sea of people to a situation that can’t be solved with rationality. But I was raised deep in the burbs of Western Sydney in the 80s, across the train-track from Struggle Street and in need of a ‘passport’ to venture into the city, as the ‘others’ used to joke. I learnt young to hold my head up high when walking down a street alone and to always stare an approaching stranger in the face. Don’t smile, unless they insult you, then casually laugh. Nothing much surprises me when it comes to human behaviour.

So I looked at the scythe poised low in the air and then craned my neck to stare Death in the face. He, being high above me, looked down his long nose as I calculated my move. At what point do I ratchet my leg back and kick him in the groin? Now? Or when he raises the scythe higher? I stared him in the face and decided to wait. I stared him in the face, but my senses were zeroed in on that scythe. If it moved a few degrees higher, and certainly before it reached halfway into the air, I would strike. It didn’t move. Neither of us moved, our eyes locked in a conversation incapable of being interpreted. What could he see? Then triggered by a truth known deep within his being, Death moved his lips and said in a slow and resounding voice that spoke to my eyes: “Jesus is coming”. And as I sensed that Jesus was not, in fact, coming, I stayed focused on the scythe, which my body could feel teetering in the air like a bat sensing its way through the night. It stayed motionless as I wondered if decapitation was really part of this grand plan, then as quick as he had come, the carriage doors opened and Death alighted.

Relieved, I looked at my fellow commuters, expecting someone to look up with a similar sense of relief that the young woman (for I was young then) had lived to see another day. Someone looked at Death’s feet as he walked out the sliding doors then back to his book. No one looked at me, and I wondered if my fellows would have really allowed him to raise his scythe into the air, or if they, too, were waiting for the right moment.

At what moment in time do we react? And what will the history books say of us, we the worker ants of circumstance, scurrying in line over trees and gardens and kitchen benches? What is our role in this grand story?

It’s a question I ask myself more frequently than I’d like to admit, mostly in times of guilt about not doing more, or anything for that matter, to stand up for the things I believe in. Strength in numbers, the saying goes, and I am a number, but among how many? Would those other numbers join me? Or would they remain seated, heads down? When should I act? And what battle am I even fighting?

Insert here the long and depressing list of atrocities around the world fuelled by ignorance and hate, including international wars, civil wars, genocides, species extinction, deforestation and environmental destruction, pollution, climate change, poverty, prejudice, racism, sexism, homophobia, the crumbling health system, the crumbling education system, disease, abuse, inequality… I ask myself as I pour my coffee, which battle should I fight? And as I empty the coffee grinds I remind myself, as I have done every day for the past six weeks, that I really must remember to order more cleaning tablets for the coffee machine, then I’m cleaning the dishes and hanging out the washing, making lunch, teaching my daughter to ride a bike, emptying the rubbish bin, now we’re colouring in, and dinner’s on the table, the children fall asleep and I sit down to work and at some point sleep and then I’m emptying the coffee grinds and thinking, dammit, I must really order those tablets. Which battle should I choose?

I suspect it’s something many of us feel—a sense of powerlessness in shaping the grand scheme of things. I say this knowing that ‘the people’ wield enormous power—the worker ants of history have written many a page. I get a sense that many of us feel that right now we are knee-deep in one of history’s potential turning points. But when do we act? How high does the scythe need to be? It’s like watching the tide wash in and out upon the shore and trying to pinpoint the precise moment it turns.

What would you have had me do? entreats a grandfather to his grandson in

George Saunders

’ short story Love Letter. In much the same way Tim Winton’s latest book Juice looks at our moment in time—history, as it has become—through the critical eyes of future youth, or conversely, how we, in this time, look back on history and wonder how Germany and the world ever let the Nazi’s take hold, George Saunders’ Love Letter opens the curtains on an America that has slipped into authoritarian rule and is wielding a strangulating grip on the lives of a grandfather and his grandson.

The heart wrenching part is, this grandfather did what he felt was within his power to change the course of history—he voted, he wrote letters to Senators and newspapers, he marched, he donated money. And yet, none of it was effective.

What would you have had me do? he says defensively, apologetically, helplessly.

It really is a brilliant work of short fiction which you can read on the New Yorker website or listen to on the New Yorker podcast¹.

Love Letter has this uncanny ability to radicalise us, to force us to look at our stifled ineffectiveness or overwhelmed inaction and believe that we can, we must, do more. We have to do more.

But it also reminds us that, amid the constant uncertainty of life, we have a very human belief that things will work out for the best, that rationality will prevail. We want to trust in the status quo and often that serves us well. But there are moments in time when the scythe rises higher than we expect. And I need to ask myself, if I were the legs of someone else—another passenger on a train, sitting by as the scythe rises into the air, would I keep my head down? Will I keep my head down? What will history make of me when it arrives?

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Things I’ve enjoyed on Substack this week

• Take Care—by

  Sherman Alexie

  Pause for a moment with this short poem, which invites you to reflect on two simple words we so often use.

• Why are *you* not speaking out on the genocide?—by

  Sarah Wilson

  An interesting question and discussion about why we keep our heads down.

• A Eulogy for Everything We Never Were (and Never Will Be Again)—by

  Cole Haddon

  Cole shares a deeply personal story about why he decided to leave the United States.

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Etymology Monday

For those who missed it, this week’s word is:

romance

and its beginning is not quite as romantic as you might imagine…

A short announcement

It’s with a lot of consideration, and some force by life’s hand, that I’ve decided to move to publishing my essays fortnightly instead of weekly. I genuinely love sharing these thoughts that pass through my head with you all and hearing yours in return, and I would continue to write weekly if there were more hours in the day, but having just 24 to make do with, I’ve had to reorder my priorities for now. I genuinely thank you all for being here with me and hope that a move to fortnightly thoughts suits you as well and allows you to catch up on reading the piles of words that are no doubt waiting for your attention.

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1. The podcast version of George Saunders’ Love Letter, read by David Sedaris, is free to listen to if you don’t have a digital subscription to access the copy in the New Yorker. You should be able to search for it within your usual podcast host.