Today is Columbus Day, the classic example of an event—the discovery of America—that we’ve been taught to celebrate but which has turned out to not be worth celebrating at all. It was the start of the European conquest of the Americas, and, after a century or so, the start of the Enlightenment and the Scientific Method. It was the spark that eventually ignited the Reformation, the Hundred Years’ War, the Industrial Revolution, democracy, the rule of law, modernity, advertising, antibiotics, psychoanalysis, industrial warfare, AI, and nihilism. It gave rise to conquistadores and robber barons and contemporary billionaires aiming to conquer the new frontiers of Mars and the asteroids and mortality itself.
On balance, it might have been better if Columbus and his three small ships had perished in a storm somewhere off Gibraltar. It might have been better if 1492 had seen a new and lethal plague ravage Europe from the Urals to Ireland, and left its depopulated kingdoms to practice genocide among themselves. It might have been better if the Ottomans had overrun Russia and then moved west, leaving rigid, static, inward-looking regimes in every place they conquered. It might have been better if the Chinese had remained isolated and uncurious about the rest of the world. The Incas and the Aztecs and the Iroquois might have invaded Europe if they had remained intact for a few hundred years longer, although they might not have considered it worth their while to contact peoples so weird, so foreign, so needy, so philosophically incomplete, so contagious.
We’ll never know. Columbus happened. Millions of elementary schoolchildren have commemorated his landing with crayoned pictures of armored humans standing on an empty beach with palm trees, practicing for the next month’s crayoned pictures of turkeys and pilgrims and Indians bearing gifts.
Millions of adults still get the day off. Italian restaurants get busy. Lots of people get to wonder about the deep and valuable ways of being that were forever lost when Europeans wrecked Native American cultures. In response to that wrecking, some communities have renamed Columbus Day Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which commemorates the victims of colonialism, a classic example of small recompense in proportion to the pain inflicted.
The consequences of Columbus’s discovery were seen as good news for half a millennium, at least by Western Civilization, but of late they seem to have begun a great extinction that will result in a host of new plants and animals—ones better suited to a hothouse planet—replacing the ones—including humans, indigenous or not—that are on the planet now. Bad news often comes disguised as good news, just to get its foot in the door.
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We cannot know how things will turn out. It’s probably not a good idea to label anything as good or bad until you do know, and since time extends infinitely into the future, you can’t know.
But you can be kind in the face of cruelty, courageous in the face of terror, persistent in the face of discouragements. You can choose beauty over ugliness every time.
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This is the 26th Aftermath post. The world seems to be in a paroxysm of uncertainty at the moment, on the cusp of some overwhelming dose of bad luck. Not much can be said about the Ukraine War or the attack on Israel from Gaza except that in a better world, they wouldn’t have happened, just like Columbus wouldn’t have happened, and their precursors wouldn’t have happened all the way back to Genesis.
I’m going to take a break from writing for a while, to see how a few cusps turn out. I’ve made no secret that part of my perceived audience, as I write, are people 500 or so years in the future. I’m hoping they can read English. I’m hoping they can read, period. I hope they will exist, literate or not.
Anyway, I write for them as well as for the rest of you, and they have an advantage over the humans of 2023 in that they know how our century and three or four subsequent ones turned out, even if their knowledge has come in the form of legends and rumors told around smoky fires in abandoned subway tunnels. It may be the only advantage they have over us, because we’re using up a lot of the resources they’ll need and won’t have.
I suspect we won’t have a clue about what will happen to us before it happens. I don’t envy future people their lives, which look on schedule to be nasty, brutish, and short, but I envy them their knowledge of our future.
A few weeks or months of perspective is what I’m after right now. I think the coming year will be full of life-changing events, and I don’t want to write any more blog posts until I can see some of the shapes coming through the fog at us. I’ve got 26 more attempts to bring these three journals of the plague years to a satisfactory finish, and right now all I can see is loose ends. So I’ll write during moments of clarity.
You probably wish I had been doing that all along.
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I do have some clarity to report, and some bad news and some good news. At the start of September I was diagnosed with a melanoma on my cheek. My previous experience with melanoma was that it killed people, so the diagnosis prompted a lot of limbic-system anxiety and dread, even though my frontal lobes told me that melanoma is now one of the more curable cancers, especially when it’s found early.
The good news is that mine was found early. According to my surgeon, the margins around the excised portions of my cheek were free from melanoma cells, and the two “sentinel” lymph nodes that he cut out of my neck were also clear. This result puts my chances of 5-year survival well above 99%, at least as far as this particular melanoma is concerned. I will die of something else.
I am aware of the irony of being kept alive by the civilization that I’ve accused of killing the planet.
The bad news is that I will die eventually, something that up until this point in my life didn’t seem possible. I’ll be 73 this month, so mortality should have occurred to me as a possibility, but it had remained as an abstract in my imagination, easily put out of consciousness.
When Julie and I were making long road trips to the Huntsman Cancer Institute in Salt Lake City, dying was suddenly tangible, real, unignorable. Especially at 75 miles an hour on the urban parts of I-15.
I am by nature an anxious person. I wake up in the middle of the night and worry about freeway pileups, new Covid variants, and whether or not I left the light on in the garage. On bad nights I worry about losing the people I love, which would be world-shattering.
Melanoma was potentially world-shattering, and it was on those terms that I chose to worry about it. How would my world and everybody else’s stay together if I wasn’t there with my copious supply of perceptual glue?
It didn’t help that I would have preferred to be helicoptered to the Huntsman Institute for surgery on the afternoon of my diagnosis, but they made me wait a long two weeks, and then another ten days, while they were doing tests and getting me on their schedule. I should have taken this as evidence of a calm everything’s-under-control attitude on their part, but I didn’t. I took it as evidence that they had given up on me and that it was hard for them to look at my lab results without seeing a sheet over my face.
I got through the waiting without drugs or very much alcohol. I didn’t get through it without the grief that stemmed from the collapse of my immortality project. I also grieved for the good life that Julie and I have had together. I grieved that I would lose Julie.
An immortality project is something everyone has, from blood-transfusing metformin-popping compulsively-exercising billionaires, to reciters of the Lord’s Prayer, to vain and deluded writers who think they will keep living in some sense if they write for people in the future.
In my case, my immortality project didn’t have that much to do with my writing. It had to do with waking from an adolescent haze thirty years ago and deciding to straighten up and fly right, treat others well, tell the truth, and marry Julie.
There’s no doubt that trying to be good and do good made my life vastly better. But any idea that I could derive immortality from good works didn’t survive the shock of a cancer diagnosis.
A lot of writers hope their work will make them immortal, but not me. My writing may convince future readers that I was alive and complaining once, but once I’m dead, I won’t come miraculously alive on the page.
I love the life I’ve had with Julie, but our trips to SLC made it clear that someday that life will end. In all likelihood, one of us will die and leave the other bereft and alone. In all likelihood, I will be the one who dies.
Anticipatory grief is still grief.
What I didn’t realize is that if you die, you have to leave. I am grieving about this leaving, and grieving the end of our good life and missing Julie already even though she’s right here, alive and well, and so am I, and moment to moment, life is good.
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So bad news about my immortality project, but good news considering I seem to have the time and inclination to put together a new one from the shambles of the old one.
Yet another reason to put off writing until things get a little more defined. I’m determined to write another 26 entries, so watch for email notifications. I’ll try not to waste your time with frivolous thoughts.
In the meantime, I’m working, with spotty success, on avoiding the dreary narcissism of the old and sick. If I should succeed in that improbable project, I’m sure my name will last at least as long as that of Columbus.