Last week’s newsletter about that yearning for the lost past that we call nostalgia set me to thinking about a symmetrical yearning in the other direction, a yearning for the future. So far as I know there is no name for such a feeling, and, given the temper of the times, some readers may wonder what I am even talking about. Nowadays, the future inspires only anxiety, at times verging on terror. We feel we are trapped in a nightmare from which we do not know if it is possible to awaken. Those eager for the future are pumped up with a toxic drug, a mixture of two thirds lust for power and one third nihilistic psychosis. Meanwhile, the good people are numb with hopelessness: if the fascists don’t get us, climate change will. Last year was the centenary of Yeats’s often-quoted poem “The Second Coming,” which says that “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” and what that poem says is coming is not Christ but a demonic figure, “moving its slow thighs,” the prefiguration of zombie apocalypse.
May 20, 2022
May 20, 2022
May 20, 2022
Last week’s newsletter about that yearning for the lost past that we call nostalgia set me to thinking about a symmetrical yearning in the other direction, a yearning for the future. So far as I know there is no name for such a feeling, and, given the temper of the times, some readers may wonder what I am even talking about. Nowadays, the future inspires only anxiety, at times verging on terror. We feel we are trapped in a nightmare from which we do not know if it is possible to awaken. Those eager for the future are pumped up with a toxic drug, a mixture of two thirds lust for power and one third nihilistic psychosis. Meanwhile, the good people are numb with hopelessness: if the fascists don’t get us, climate change will. Last year was the centenary of Yeats’s often-quoted poem “The Second Coming,” which says that “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,” and what that poem says is coming is not Christ but a demonic figure, “moving its slow thighs,” the prefiguration of zombie apocalypse.