As this decade fades away, I am struck by how much has changed. How the Soviet Union and the World Trade Center fell; one that raised and one that crushed hope.
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But today I read the opening paragraph of "As We Are: A Modern Review" by the best author ever, E.F. Benson. In this, my closing post of 2009 and the decade that is best forgotten, I leave you with his words of 1932 (after "The Great War" but before it became the first of two world wars).
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Across the chasm which, in 1914, split time in two, making for the space of a generation at least a new era, A.B. or Anno Belli, from which to date our chronicles, little glimpses of a world, very distinct, but immensely remote, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope , occasionally flit across the field of memory.
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It is not only the sundering years of the War which make them so distant, but chiefly the accomplished transition for the days when so much was taken for granted as being part of a secure and immutable order to the days when nothing seems secure, and when only the most reckless gambler would take the longest odds that he would live to see the discovery of a working hypothesis of which a return of national prosperity could be framed.
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Ever higher in the waste-paper basket for useless formulae grows the debris of scrapped suggestions, and more frequent the collapse of Utopian palaces which idealists aspired to build in a world which the War, so they declared, had delivered from the possibility of its recurrence.
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Sobbering words to be true, but hope - the greatest of our human gifts - propels us onward. Looking back makes me want to go foreward. To quote that other famous prophet, Gloria Gaynor, I Will Survive!